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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GLIMPSES 



AT THE 



PLANT WORLD 



BV <r 

FANNY (d* BERGEN 



" To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears n 
Wordsworth 



iFulIg Ellustratrt 



BOSTON Mocccxcn 



lfj£; 



LEE AND SHEPARD Publishers 

io Milk Street next "The Old South Meeting house" 
NEW YORK CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM 

718 and 720 Broadway 



Copyright, 1891, 
By Lee and Shefard. 

glimpses at the plant world, 



Unttocrsito l^rrss : 

John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



-£> 



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CONTENTS. 



Page 

Glimpses at the Plant-world i 

I. What is a Plant ? 13 

II. The Plant which makes Bread rise . 17 

III. What is Mould? 20 

IV. A Word about Toadstools 25 

V. Some other Flowerless Plants ... 28 

VI. Frog-spit 34 

VII. A Garden in the Sea 41 

VIII. Sea Plants {Continued) 45 

IX. Robin-wheat 51 

X. Ferns 58 

XI. The Walking-fern 62 

XII. A Plant in Armor 67 

XIII. The Linen Plant 73 

XIV. Summary 77 

XV. The Parts of the Flower 80 

XVI. How Seeds are Perfected 87 



v i , CONTENTS. 

Page 

XVII. How Flowers hire their Pollen car- 
ried 93 

XVIII. Some Pollen-carriers ioo 

XIX. A Bumble-bee in a Lion's Mouth . 107 

XX. A Moth's Visit 114 

XXI. A Night-blooming Flower 120 

XXII. A Night-blooming Flower {Continued) 124 

XXIII. Compound Flowers 127 

XXIV. Plumed or Feathered Seeds .... 133 
XXV. Winged Seeds 139 

XXVI. Stick-tights ... ...... 144 

XXVII. Oth er Ways by which Seeds travel . 149 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



Dear Children, — 



I hope these little 
about a few of the 
ful and beau- « 

II; 

plant-world 





talks 

WnF many wonder- 

tiful things in the 

will help you to see 

understand some things 

about you that you have 

not yet noticed. When I was 

a little girl, I lived in the 

country and spent a great 

deal of time in the woods and 

fields. I had so many happy days 

among the wild-flowers ! I did not 

always know their names, but I knew 

the little plant-folks themselves, and knew the very 

spot where I was to look for this or that particular 

kind. From the putting out of the soft, silvery, 

1 



2 GLIMPSES AT THE P LA XT-WORLD. 

pussy-willow catkins, in the very first spring days, 
and the scarlet mist made a little later by the thick 
clusters of the tiny red flowers of the maples along 
the still leafless branchlets, to the plumes of the 
goldenrod and the modest asters of early autumn, 
each week and almost each day brought some new 
blossom for which to search in woods or fields. The 




The Spring-Beauty. 

spring-beauty with its gracefully hanging buds and 
pink-and-white bells, which is to Western children 
what the sweeter Mayflower is to those who live in 
New England, came very early in the spring, and 
grew plentifully both in woodlands and in grass- 
fields, particularly along the fence-rows. About 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



ihe same lime, at the roots of old stumps or in 
sheltered nooks we might 
expect to find clumps of the 
large, thick leaves of the 
bloodroot unrolled enough 
to show the pale stems, 
each crowned with the 
white flower whose petals 
so soon fall from the yel- 
low centre in a snowy 
shower. On the side of 
a low hill stood the only 
service-berry tree in our 
neighborhood. When it 
shook forth its filmy white 
blossoms we felt that the 
wild-flower time had really 
begun. Later, on the bor- 
ders of the woods the 
showy dogwoods hung out 
their white or sometimes 
pale rose-colored banners. 
The flowery branches both 
of service-berry and of dogwood were easily 




Bloodroot. 



4 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

brought down so low that we could grasp them ; 
but later on, when the beautiful orange and pale- 
green flowers of the stately tulip-trees came, they 
were far beyond reach. Sometimes a pelting rain 
broke off a few of these great flowers ; and as 
I afterwards picked them from the ground and 
looked into their cups, I thought what a won- 
derful place it must be away up in the tall treetop, 
among the multitudes of blossoms and green leaves. 
The airy gardens that I longed for, however, are 
visited by many winged insects, among them a 
kind of glistening, bronzy-green beetle ; for such 
little creatures are pretty sure to be found crawl- 
ing about in the flower-cups of the tulip-tree. It 
was not until late June that the bunches of creamy 
tassels on the chestnut-trees gave promise of our 
favorite nut. 

While speaking of tree-flowers, I ought not to 
forget the fruit-trees in the orchard near the house. 
We used to watch the little knobs of buds all along 
the twigs and branches of the peach-trees, seeing 
them swell in the warm spring showers until they 
began to open enough to show a little pink color ; 
then, after a day or two of hot sunshine, the whole 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



5 



peach-orchard suddenly burst into one great cloud 
of rosy bloom. But the fragrance of the peach- 
blossoms did not compare with the sweet, healthful 
odor of the pink-and-white apple-blossoms, which 
you all know so well. Then there was the wealth 
of blossoms on the scattered pear and cherry trees, 
and bending somewhat over our spring were two 
or three wild plum-trees. In the early morning, 
I was often sent to fetch a pail of cool water ; 
if these trees were a-bloom, I loved to stand 
under them, breathing in the sweet, strong perfume 
of their white blossoms, which were alive with 
droning, humming honey-seekers ; and before I 
filled my pail dozens of the curving white petals 
that had fallen from the overhanging boughs, and 
that floated on the water like tiny boats, had to be 
pushed aside. 

But to go back to the wild flowers. There were 
the little yellow blossoms of the spice-wood, set 
close to the twigs, whose fragrant bark we liked to 
eat. In a little glade, through which flowed a 
brook, I remember there came up by the hundred, 
early in the season, a kind of pretty fern. By the 
time the ferns were well unrolled, blue violets 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 






began to open, and then came the spotted leaves of 
the adder's-tongue and its yellow, lily-shaped flow- 
ers. On a certain hillside I was sure to find the 

first hepaticas, — 
some of a sea- 
shell pink, and 
others of a rare 
| blue or purple. I 
never could quite 
decide which I 
liked better, these 
lovely spring blos- 
soms, or the last 
year's leaves all 
mottled with rich 
red and purple 
and green. If you 
know the hepati- 
Adder's-tongue. ca> — or liverwort, 

as it is often called, — you know how the old 
leaves last over the winter, come out from under 
the snow in deep warm colors, and linger awhile 
about the fresh buds and blossoms before they 
give place to new leaves that in soft downy coats 




GLIMPSES AT THE P LA XL-WORLD. 7 

slowly push their way up into the light. Then 
there were the pepper-root, the dainty bishop's 
cap, the lovely rue-anemone, — known with us a., 




Hepaticas. 

the wind-flower, — the snowy wake-robin, and the 
wild pink geranium, or crane's bill. The flower of 
the Indian turnip, which you know as "Jack in 
the Pulpit," I gathered in the spring with my wild 



8 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



flowers ; and one of the brightest bits of color in 
the autumn woods was made by its ripened fruit, 




Rue-Anemone. 

the clustered bunches of scarlet berries. I knew 
one spot where the partridge-berry grew, and in 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD* 



9 



one particular wood-pasture I was pretty sure to 
find a pink and white orchid, which the children 
where I lived called " Adam and Eve," because 
of its single pair of broad green leaves. The 
root of this plant we prized because by cutting 




Wake-robin. 

and squeezing it we obtained a sticky juice which 
was very useful in mending broken dishes in our 
playhouses. Among the commonest of our wild 
flowers were two kinds of pink phlox which we 
called "wild sweet-william." 

I call to mind two wild flowers that were so 



10 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD 

scarce in our part of the country that it was 
counted a lucky find to secure either of them. 
One was the showy yellow lady's-slipper, all dappled 
with red. This is sometimes called the moccasin- 
flower. The other was the brilliant fire-pink. I 
never found this about my own home except on 
the edge of a certain sandy ledge that faced the 
south, and I never begrudged a walk of a mile or 
two if I could bring home even one or two of the 
tropical-looking flowers that seemed to have caught 
and kept the glory of the hot summer sun, The 
common dark-blue violet we found everywhere, both 
in woods and fields ; but a lovely velvety white one, 
with delicate purple markings, grew only in a few 
chosen places in the rich soil of deep woods. The 
yellow violet, too, was quite rare. Much of the big 
meadow through which ran the same little brook of 
the wood-glade was fairly carpeted in spring with 
violets. There was the common blue one that 
everybody knows, a pale-blue one with funny long 
spurs, and a small greenish white violet, very dif- 
ferent from and not half so pretty as the beautiful 
one of the woodlands; and yellow buttercups, with 
their varnished petals, starred the whole meadow. 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLA XT-WORLD. u 

Here, too, grew the graceful brown-spotted red and 
yellow field-lilies ; but they did not bloom until mid- 
summer. I rarely had the pleasure of gathering 
these regal blossoms with my own hands, for by 
the time they were ready to bloom we were forbid- 
den to run through the meadow, lest we should 
trample and tangle the high timothy-grass, as the 




Blue Violets. 

mowing season was at hand. However, when the 
mowers with their shining scythes cut the grass, 
if my father was in the field he was sure to look 
out for the lilies and to pick them out from the 
swaths of grass and stand them in a jug of water 
that was kept in a shady place for the men to 
drink. Then he would call to me, and I would 
run from the house to the hayfield, to bring back 



12 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

the tall stalks surrounded with their long tapering- 
leaves, each bearing at its summit several splendid 
flowers. I used to think these must have been the 
kind that Christ meant when he said, " Consider 
the lilies of the field. " I have since learned that 
the wild lilies of Palestine are much like our own. 

But it would take too long to mention half of the 
plants, flowers, and fruits that I used to play with 
in northern Ohio, where I lived when I was a 
child. There were all sorts of lovely and interest- 
ing things : the velvety mosses which we used to 
bring from the woods by the basketful, with which 
to carpet our playhouses ; the pale little ghosts of 
plants named Indian pipes ; the gay leaves of au- 
tumn ; the bright berries of wild vines, shrubs, and 
trees, — each and all were welcomed in their time. 
Well, I was so glad in their company that I wish 
you to know and to enjoy every one of the growing 
things with which you meet. 



I. 



WHAT IS A PLANT? 



One fine spring morning, as I sat thinking about 
the fresh young grass, the pussy-willows, and the 
scarlet blossoms on the ma- 
ple-trees, my little friend 
Jack came into the room. 
"Jack," said I, " have you 
noticed how pretty the 
green grass is, and how 
many plants are beginning 
to wake up from their win- 
ter sleep ? " Jack had seen 
it all and had felt the 
beauty of it all, but had 
not thought much about 
it ; and when I asked him 
if he could tell me what a 
plant was, he seemed quite surprised at my asking 




Moss. 



14 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



such a simple question. "Why, a plant is — let 
me see — a plant is something that has leaves 
and flowers." Then I picked up a bit of moss 
out of a saucerful that was standing on the win- 
dow-sill and asked Jack if that was a plant. He 
said that it was. " But has it any flowers ? " 
said I. He felt sure that moss never had flowers ; 
so then I asked him why he thought that it was a 
plant. After looking at it for a minute, 
he answered, " Because it has little 
things like leaves." Now, that seemed 
to me a very good answer, and I told 
Jack so. Then I tried him with a bit 
of dry seaweed, of the common blad- 
dery kind, that happened to be lying 
on the table among some shells and 
other sea-things which we had brought 
from the beach the summer before. 
He felt quite sure that this was a plant, 
too (perhaps the name sea-weed helped 
a common him) ; but he could n't give any very 
good reason why. " Now, Jack," said 
I, "are you ready by this time to tell me what a 
plant is ? " He seemed a little puzzled, but said at 



WHAT IS A PLANT t 15 

last, "Anything that grows is a plant." But when 
I asked whether a dog grows, and if so, whether a 
dog is a plant, Jack saw that this answer would n't 
do either. We finally decided that we might safely 
say that the things that grow are either animals or 
plants, and Jack felt sure that any one with com- 
mon-sense could tell an animal from a plant ; for he 
said that while animals can hear, smell, taste, and 
feel, plants cannot ; animals can travel about, but 
plants cannot. However, after we came to talk it 
over a little more, we found that some of the things 
that Jack had said about the differences between 
animals and plants were not in every case correct ; 
for such animals as oysters and sponges cannot see 
nor move about, and there are some plants that 
seem able to feel, and many tiny ones, which live in 
the water, that move about freely. At last we de- 
cided that while it is easy enough to tell which is 
the animal and which the plant when we are look- 
ing at a dog and a rose-bush, it is not easy at all to 
make up one's mind whether to call some of the 
simplest and smallest of living things animals or 
plants. Many of these least of all living things 
are so very small that we could not see one of them 



1 6 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

with the eye alone, and in order to learn anything 
about their form, size, and color people have to 
study them with glasses that make things look 
many times larger than they really are. Such a 
glass is called a microscope. 1 

1 Thoroughly good compound microscopes are expensive instru- 
ments. There are, however, a few cheap kinds to be had, by aid 
of which children may be shown and may soon learn to discover 
for themselves great numbers of interesting objects. The house- 
hold microscope, furnished by Jas. W. Queen & Co., 924 Chestnut 
Street, Phila., for about $6, will serve to show most of the micro- 
scopic objects referred to in this little book. Its magnifying power 
is too low to enable one to make out the structure of the yeast- 
plant, but it will enable children to see and understand something 
of the structure of mould and all the larger fresh-water algae. 



II. 



THE PLANT WHICH MAKES BREAD 
RISE. 

If you have ever watched your mother mix bread, 
perhaps you know that the yeast which is stirred 
into the bread-sponge causes it to rise ; but do you 
know that this means that the yeast is growing? 
That is really what is going on ; for yeast is a living 
thing, and as it grows it causes very small bubbles of 
gas to rise all through the bread-dough, so as to 
make it swell up and become light, that is, full of 
small holes. If you put a drop of yeast and water on 
a slip of glass and look at it with a strong microscope, 
you may see that yeast is made up of little round 
things like toy balloons, with a covering as thin as 
that of a soap-bubble ; only these tiny balloons 
that compose yeast are full of soft pulp almost as 
thin as water. Now, what will you say when I tell 
you that each of these tiny little bubbles is a plant ? 
But these plants are so small that you could lift 




!8 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

many thousands of them on the point of a pin, so 
of course we can only see them and learn about 
how they grow by looking at 
them through a microscope, 
which makes them seem a 
great deal larger than they 
really are. If you were to watch 

Yeast-cells these ]j tt ] e p l ants w j t h a m \_ 

(greatly magnified). 

croscope, you would find each 
one of them growing for a while, and by-and-by, 
when it gets to its full size, sending out a smaller 
bubble on one side, after which that grows to be as 
large as the first, and in time this second plant 
sends out another, and so on ; for you must remem- 
ber that each single one of these small, round, soft 
balls is a whole plant. The yeast-plants need to be 
in a warm place and to have plenty of water in 
order to grow. But if a speck of yeast be put in a 
quart bottle of lukewarm water which is sweetened 
a very little, and the mixture be allowed to stand 
for a few hours in some warm place, the whole 
bottle of water will be alive with yeast-plants. 

The next time that your mother sets her bread, 
remember she is putting those little plants in a 



THE P LA XT WHICH MAKES BREAD RISE. 



19 



warm, moist place, so that they may grow rapidly, 
and thus cause the bread to rise ; if they do not 
grow, the bread will not be light. There are very 
many kinds of these tiny plants in the world, some- 
thing like the yeast-plant ; a few of them are very 
useful, while others do great harm. Such tiny 
growing things are so plentiful that often the food 
we eat, the water we drink, and the very air we 
breathe swarm with them or with the dust-like 
particles from which they grow ; but our eyes are 
not keen enough to see them except when multi- 
tudes of them are piled up together, as they are in 
a cake of compressed yeast. 



III. 

WHAT IS MOULD? 

All of you must have noticed the little downy 
patches, sometimes blue and sometimes white, that 
are apt to come on your boots or shoes if you leave 
them long in a dark, damp place. You call such 
little spots mould ; but do you think of mould as a 
plant that grows in its own way just as truly as 
violets and the green grass grow in their way ? 
There are ever so many different kinds of moulds. 
You have probably seen the fuzzy blue kind that 
grows on old cheese, or on stale bread if it be kept 
in a damp closet ; or the thick white velvety mould 
that often grows over the surface of preserves or 
canned fruit. I have sometimes seen the top of a 
cup or glass of jelly quite covered with a smoke- 
colored mould that grows up into slender branches 
which so interlace that when any one examines 



WHA T IS MOULD ? 



21 




Mould 

(seen through the 

microscope). 



the growth carefully it looks like a delicate forest 
of mimic trees. Such mould as this when seen 
through a microscope is very lovely. 

Nature is full of beautiful 
things that are too small and 
delicate for our unaided eyes to 
see. Men often try to make their 
front doors beautiful, and their 
carpets and sugar-bowls and 
plenty of large ornaments and 
pieces of furniture, but in Na- 
ture we find beautiful forms and 
carvings and colors in things so very small that to 
see them at all we must look at them through a 
microscope. I once went with a young lady to 
give directions to her dressmaker for making a 
lovely blue silk dress. The thing that my friend 
was most particular about was that the dress 
should be well made on the wrong side. She 
said, " Be sure to finish it nicely on the wrong 
side ; I wish it to be neat and pretty on the wrong 
side." That was like Nature. Atoms of seeds 
such as poppies shake out of their pepper-box 
pods, or such as the shining morsels that you 



22 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

may see lying piled up when you take the cone- 
shaped lid from off the little seed-dish of the por 
tulaca, when magnified, are seen to be wonder- 
fully sculptured. Some of these very moulds of 
which we are talking, when looked at through a 
microscope, seem like magic gardens of delicate 
plants laden with wonderful fruits. 

I told you that the moulds are all plants, and 
that they grow; but I suppose you say, " What 
makes them grow ? who sows their seeds ? M 
These rapidly growing plants do not come, as do 
very many of our vegetables and garden flowers, 
from seeds that must be planted in the earth ; the 
moulds all grow from tiny dust-like particles that 
are called spores. These spores grow in little 
pouches or cups that are borne on the moulds just 
as seed-pods or fruits are borne on flowering plants ; 
for the moulds do not have blossoms or real fruit, 
but only the pretty little vessels in which grow 
thousands upon thousands of the speck-like spores. 
These spores do not need to be covered with earth 
in order to grow; but if they fall on any damp 
surface in a dark or shaded place, new mould- 
plants like those that bore the spores may grow 



WHAT IS MOULD? 



23 



from them. Now, do you ask where the spores 

come from, and how they get into our pantries and 

closets, and cellars and sheds, to cause the moulds 

of various kinds to j 

grow on our food or 

clothes ? They are 

in the air, for when 

the spores are quite 

ripe the pouches in 

which they grow 

open, and out fly the 

dry spores by the 

hundred ; and as 

they are so very 

light and small they 

may float about a 

long time before alighting. So they are carried 

hither and thither by every motion of the air 

Many of these spores never grow ; for if they are 

in well-lighted and well-heated places they will 

come to nothing. Sunshine, which is so needful 

for our green-leaved flowering plants, keeps the 

moulds from growing; and this is a good thing 

too, for some kinds of moulds and many of their 




Mould. 

I. Bearing Spore-cases. 
II. One of the Spore-cases, still 
more magnified. 



24 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



relations are very troublesome to men and to some 
other animals. 

The moulds are only one group of a large class 
of flowerless plants that are called " fungi." That 
is not a very hard word, and I wish you would re- 
member it. The mildews and blights that often 
attack our gooseberry-bushes, grape-vines, and 
many other useful plants, and which cause the 
farmers and fruit-growers a great deal of bother and 
loss, are also fungi. Yeast, too, is a kind of fungus, 

— for fungus is what we call one of the fungi, 

— and so is the slimy, shapeless plant that is com- 
monly called " mother," and which grows in our 
vinegar-jugs and barrels. 



IV. 



A WORD ABOUT TOADSTOOLS. 



You all know these 
pretty little umbrellas 
that so quickly unfurl 
themselves on damp, 
shaded spots of ground 
after a warm rain. 
Some are brown, others 
white, and more of 
lovely dove colors or 
soft gray tints. I sup- 
pose you all call them 
toadstools. Some boys 
and girls think that 

they are called toadstools because toads build 
them for their own use. My young friend Jack 
told me that when he was a very little fellow he 
really believed that his playmates the brown toads 
sat under the toadstools to keep dry when it 




A Cluster of Toadstools 



26 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



rained and squatted on top of them when the sun 
shone. But I hardly need to tell you that toads 

have nothing whatever to 
do with these umbrella- 
shaped plants ; for each 
one is a plant that grows 
very fast in warm, damp 
weather. Did you ever 
eat mushrooms ; or, bet- 
ter still, did you ever go 
out into the shady green 
woods to gather them 
when the hot spring sun 
and warm showers make 
all plants grow? Some- 
times you find mushrooms 
growing in old orchards, 
They like the soft leaf- 
mould found under ap- 
ple-trees. Mushrooms are 
a morel. plants much like toad- 

stools. Some kinds of toadstools are poisonous to 
eat, but many other kinds are very nice for food. 
Here is a picture of one kind of mushroom that 




A WORD ABOUT TOADSTOOLS. 



27 



is often eaten. Have you ever seen it growing? 
It is very pretty, of a lovely golden-brown color. 
It has a pretty name too. It is called the morel. 
In England, many ignorant people believe that the 
mushrooms that are gathered for food must be 
picked before sunrise or else they will hide under 
the ground and stay concealed till twilight. Is 
not this a silly notion ? 

Did you ever, in walking in a field or by the 
roadside, stamp on a dry puff-ball, and as it broke 
in pieces see the dark dust fly up in a little 
cloud ? Puff-balls, too, are plants really very much 
like toadstools and mushrooms, but of a different 
shape. Every little speck of the fine dust that 
children like to make fly out of the puff-ball may 
grow into a new one if it fall on moist, rich soil, 
and the weather be warm enough, for each of 
them is a spore. Puff-balls, mushrooms, and 
toadstools, as well as the moulds, all belong to 
the great class of plants called fungi. 



V. 
SOME OTHER FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 

If you live in the country, or if you go there in 
vacation to run about the fields and woods and 
grow strong in the sunshine, I think you must have 
noticed the soft little greenish-gray tufts that grow 
on old fences or fallen trees, or on decaying tree- 
stumps. We children, when I was a little girl, used to 
call these pretty tufts " whisker-moss," — I suppose 
because they look somewhat like gray beard. They 
are not mosses, but belong to another group of 
plants called lichens, of which there are many hun- 
dreds of kinds in the world. Many of them are often 
incorrectly called mosses ; but they form an entirely 
different group of plants, though, like the mosses 
and toadstools, they do not bear flowers or real 
seeds, but grow from dust-like specks that you will 
remember are named spores. Lichens are so plen- 
tiful and of so many kinds that you cannot walk far, 



SOME OTHER FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 



2 9 



where anything at all grows, without seeing more 
than one kind ; or if you do not see them, it is 
because your eyes do not serve you as they are able 
to do, for these quiet little flowerless plants are 
waiting all about you. The wrinkled discs and 
patches that spread themselves over rocks and 
stone walls are lichens. Some of them are very 




A Common Lichen. 

thin, and cling closely to the surface of the stone, 
and are so nearly of the color of the rocks where 
they live that you may easily pass them by un- 
noticed ; others you can readily loosen from their 
hold on the rocks, particularly in wet weather. In 
spite of the dull tints of some kinds, there are 
many lovely colors to be seen in the lichens. There 



30 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



are soft browns and grays, and whitish grays, and 
greens of many shades, and yellows and scarlets. 
The colors change very greatly as the air is moist 
or dry. Children who live in the city and cannot 
go at all times into the fields or woods to find 
lichens, in order to see them need only to look at 
the trunks of the large shade-trees along the streets 
or in the parks. On many of the old trees (unless 
they have been scraped by the city forester), the 
bark is sure to be of a more or less distinct yellow 
or dull orange color. Look closely at such trees 
and you will see that this is caused by a yellow 
lichen that dot by dot is creeping its way over the 
tree-trunk. There is much more of this lichen 
growth on the north side of the trees, because 
these flowerless plants like the shade and moisture. 
When a long gentle rain sets in, if you watch these 
yellow lichen-patches you will see them gradually 
change to a yellowish green and sometimes to a 
real green. They say that in old times the Ameri- 
can Indians often guided themselves through the 
woods by noticing these tree-lichens, which, as they 
knew, grew thickest on the side facing north. 
One pretty kind of lichen that is very common 



SOME OTHER FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 31 

bears tiny pale green stalks tipped with bright red. 
They look like groups of green fairy-men wearing 
scarlet caps. But you must look for yourselves 
and see how many kinds of these plants you can 
find, and take them to your teacher, who will tell 
you more about them than there is room here for 
me to do. 

Humming-birds gather the crinkly light-gray 
lichens and with them deftly cover the whole out- 
side of their nests. This the cunning little builders 
do to protect their nests from the sight of enemies. 
One of the loveliest things I ever saw was one of 
these wee nests fastened to some twigs that were 
thickly grown with lichens of a color very like those 
with which the mother-bird had covered her nest. 

Humming-birds are not the only animals that 
make use of the device of making their homes to 
resemble their surroundings so closely that they 
cannot be distinguished from them. More than 
this, very many animals and plants, too, have grad- 
ually come to mimic so exactly the objects among 
which they live that they are thus enabled to escape 
from their enemies. The animals, too, are in this 
way able to steal unobserved upon their prey. 



32 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 




Iceland Moss. 



There is a kind of eatable lichen that grows 
plentifully in far-away Iceland. The high plains 

and mountain-sides 
ip. there are often quite 
overgrown with this 
lichen, which the 
Icelanders cook in 
milk and use in va- 
rious ways for food. 
In the season for 
gathering it the 
boys and girls of 
this north country 
go on their ponies, with well-packed baskets of 
provisions, and camp out on the hillsides while 
they harvest the fields of lichens. The young 
folks look forward to this mountain-trip with great 
pleasure, for they have a merry time in this out-of- 
door life. The lichens are gathered and spread to 
dry, and then packed and loaded on the backs of 
the stout ponies to be carried home. Eatable 
lichens grow in many other parts of Europe, in 
the far north, and one kind is plentiful in the cold- 
est parts of North America. Lichens are not very 



SOME OTHER FLOWERLESS PLANTS. 



33 



important for human food, as they are tasteless, and 
not as nourishing as many other things ; but the 
hardy reindeer whose home is in the cold north- 
lands, at some seasons of the year lives almost 
wholly upon one kind of lichen. For this reason it 
is often called reindeer-moss. 

" Little lichen, fondly clinging 
In the wild-wood to the tree; 
Covering all unseemly places, 
Hiding all thy tender graces, 
Ever dwelling in the shade, 
Never seeing sunny glade." 



VI. 

FROG-SPIT. 

How many of you believe that frogs have any- 
thing to do with making the green scum commonly 
called "frog-spit," that is so often seen drifting on 
ponds ? In parts of Canada the boys and girls call 
it "frogs' eggs." The big-eyed frogs hide under 
this green curtain, and sometimes you see one pop- 
ping his head up through it and peeping out over 
the floating garden ; for you are to know that the 
so-called frog-spit is nothing more nor less than 
this. The green scum, whether it form a large 
patch or be scattered in little floating islands, is 
entirely made up of one kind or of several kinds 
of plants that grow only in fresh water. There are 
hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of plants 
that grow in the fresh water of pools, ponds, brooks, 
and rivers. The kinds that grow in one little body 
of water may be quite different from those found 



FROG-SPIT. 



35 



in a neighboring one. The " frog-spit " that is often 
caught on the blade of an oar, when a boat is 
rowed through it, and that hangs down from the 
uplifted oar like a green veil, appears to the naked 
eye only a shapeless mass ; but lift a little of the 
soft stuff from the water and place it under a micro- 
scope and you will see a tangle of delicate tubes. 
Each tube is really composed of a row of cells 
placed end to end, thus making delicate circular 
partitions in the tube. A bright green pulp is seen 
through the thin walls of the threadlike plants ; for 
you will remember that each green thread is a 
separate plant. Sometimes this green material 
almost entirely fills the cells ; at other times it is 
arranged in a regular pattern ; in some of the com- 
monest kinds of these plants it runs in a beautiful 
spiral coil throughout the whole length of each 
tube. The different kinds, or as the botanists call 
them, the species of these beautiful little water- 
plants, are partially known from one another by the 
way in which the green contents of the cells are 
arranged. 

There are many other fresh-water plants very 
different from these thread-shaped ones. In many 



36 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



species each plant consists of a single cell some- 
thing like the yeast, but colored green or brown, 

and not always roundish 
as the yeast-cell is. 
One of the most inter- 
esting of these cell 
plants is that which 
botanists call by a long 
Latin name which 
means something like 
rolling globe. It is 
really a group or colony 
of very little plants, all 
bound together into a 
hollow globe, furnished 
with hundreds of little 
hairs that act like oars and row it round and 
round, over and over, in the oddest imaginable 
way. 

Charming little water arbors and gardens, not 
large enough for a minnow to swim about in, full 
of queer puzzles like this rolling household of plants, 
may be found clustered around the stem of any 
pickerel-weed, or pond lily ; but there is room here 




Some " Frog-spit ' 
(magnified). 



FROG-SPIT. 



37 



to tell of but a very few of these fresh-water 
plants. 

The diatoms, which form one class, are so very 
interesting that I must tell you just a word about 
them. A good many years ago I tried the experi- 
ment of tying some very fine muslin over the 
kitchen faucet. Our supply of water came from a 
great lake, and straining the water in this way 
would catch any wee water-plants that might be 
brought into the pipes with the lake-water. Leav- 
ing the water running a little all night, in the morn- 
ing I found there was a thin layer of brownish 
slime on the muslin strainer. On scraping off this 
slime and looking at a speck of it through a micro- 
scope, one could see the little plants of which it was 
entirely made. The diatoms consist of single cells, 
of many different shapes, — some like a fan, some 
like a round pill-box, some like a boat, and so on. 
But they all are alike in one thing, that is, in having 
the beautifully marked and sculptured shell or coat- 
ing of their cells made of a flinty substance like 
quartz-rock. These exquisite atoms of plants can 
be cleaned from any slime or earth that clings to 
them by boiling them with strong acids that will eat 



38 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

away and dissolve everything but the little flinty 
skeletons of the separate cells. Those that are 




Diatoms. 

shown in the picture have been cleaned in this way. 
Diatoms are found all over the world, growing in a 
greater variety of places perhaps than any other 
kind of living thing. They grow in all sorts of 
fresh water, and are even found living in hot springs 
where the water is nearly up to the boiling-point. 



FROG-SPIT. 39 

Quantities of the tiny things discolor for hundreds 
and even thousands of miles the great ice-fields of 
the polar regions. The oceans are alive with them, 
and great portions of the bed of the sea are cov- 
ered with the skeletons of diatoms that have lived 
and died in its waters, and slowly sunk — perhaps 
for weeks or months — until they found a quiet 
resting-place at the bottom. Similar beds, of the 
kinds that live in fresh water, may now be forming 
at the bottom of any fresh-water pool. 

There is another group of very beautiful one- 
celled plants called the desmids. They are like 
the diatoms in their mode of growing and in their 
habit of being always in motion. But the desmids 
differ from the diatoms in being without any flinty 
shell and in their color, which is a lovely bright 
green. These little green water-plants, that spend 
their whole lives in swimming about, like the dia- 
toms, are of many pretty shapes. One very com- 
mon form is like that of the new or crescent 
moon. 

Some of the earlier explorers in the Arctic 
regions were much interested in the red snow that 
they found, in some places reaching for miles, in 



40 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



beds many feet deep. It was at last found that 
this snow was colored red by multitudes of tiny 
one-celled plants that lived and grew in 
it. You may never see these wonderful 
rosy snow-banks, but almost the same 
kind of plant that colors them you may 
find in damp eaves-troughs, and in stag- 
nant pools or in rain-water barrels. This 
common kind is sometimes red, but gen- 
erally green. It is called the rain-water 
plant. Perhaps I ought to have told 
you before that all the plants which are 
described in this lesson produce spores 
from which new plants grow. One very 
curious and wonderful thing about this 
rain-water plant is that some of the 
little cells start out in life not as tiny 
globes, like those of the yeast, but 
as little pear-shaped plants, each 
one with a pair of the tiniest hairs 
with which it constantly rows itself 
Two^Desmids. about through the water. You can- 
not imagine how small these little oar-hairs are. 





VII. 

A GARDEN IN THE 



J V 



If you look on your map of the State of 
Maine you will see where the Atlantic ocean 
sweeps into the land between Maine and New 
Brunswick, making the deep, irregular bay called 
by the old Indian name Passamaquoddy. This 
bay has many arms that stretch into the coast 
making numerous smaller bays. 

On a little island in one of these small bays I 
spent some time one summer camping out. It 
chanced to be a time when the ocean-tides rose 
very high and fell very low. At high tide the 
water ran far in on the island coast, and when the 
tide went out, ledges of rock, a sandy beach, and 
low flats were left uncovered for several hours. I 
often found on the beach, as the tide went out, 



42 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



stray seaweeds torn by the waves from where 
they had grown on the sides of the rocks or from 
the sea-bottom near the island, but I longed to see 
these treasures growing. 

So one morning, when the tide was quite low, 
we took a little flat-bottomed skiff that could float 
in the shoal water and slowly sailed around our 
island. In many places the water was not more 
than a foot deep, and as the air was very still one 
could see distinctly through the clear water not 
only all the living things but the very grains of 
yellow sand at the bottom. It was a real wonder- 
land that I saw as I bent over the side of the boat 
and looked down into the shallow, sunlit water. 
There were clumps of orange sponges holding up 
their finger-like prongs, and shoals of spiny sea- 
urchins; and here and there a yellow star-fish was 
out for a morning stroll. Most of these sea-stars 
were quite small, only two or three inches across ; 
but we saw a few great ones that actually meas- 
ured nearly a foot from tip to tip. Then there 
were several sorts of fish sailing hither and thither, 
and the misshapen old flounders that lay close to 
the sandy bottom ; for they well know that this is 



A GARDEN IN THE SEA. 



43 



the best way to hide from their enemies, since 
their color and markings are very like the sand on 
which they lie so motionless. 

But I must tell you about the lovely garden in 
the salt water, and say no more about the inter- 
esting animals that were among the sea-plants. 
Sometimes the boat would for many yards creep 
over great beds of a kind of pale-green seaweed. 
This consists of waving leafy ribbons that look a 
little like some very delicate and beautifully col- 
ored kind of lettuce. Then there were ever so 
many kinds of dark brown and purplish and dull 
red and bright pink plants that are usually called 
sea-mosses. These delicate plants can be pre- 
served almost perfectly by placing them in a basin 
of fresh water, slipping a sheet of paper under 
them as they float, and gently lifting them so as 
to drain off the water. After being pressed and 
dried on the paper they look like exquisite pic- 
tures painted in their natural colors, though some 
of them are not as bright as when growing in the 
water. Oh, I wish I could take every one of you 
little people out at low-tide, and with you see just 
such a sea-bed as that I sailed over for two or 



44 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

three miles that summer morning. If all manner 
of jewels had been scattered over the sea-sands 
they could have shown no fairer colors than the 
greens, browns, ambers, purples, reds, and pinks of 
the indescribable things growing in masses in 
this lonely spot. Sometimes, clinging to a feath- 
ery bit of seaweed was a tiny shell, and within, all 
cuddled up, lay the little creature who lived there. 
Did n't he have a pretty home in his cunningly 
fashioned shell-house, nestled among the bright 
sea-mosses and always rocked by the lapping 
waves of the pure ocean-water ? 




VIII. 

SEA PLANTS 

(Continued.) 

Seaweeds of one kind or another are found in 
all parts of the world where there is salt water. 
There are a great many kinds of seaweeds, and 
they vary in size, all the way from the pretty 
feathery " mosses " that I saw in the little bay in 
eastern Maine, and that are common all along our 
Atlantic coast, to great plants that are found in 
the south Pacific ocean, which sometimes grow a 
thousand or fifteen hundred feet in length. This 
is the longest plant in the world. Here is a pic- 
ture of it. The long stem grows up from the 
clustering roots, which anchor the plant to the 
sea-bottom or to the rocks from which it grows. 
These roots are called the " hold-fast," because 
they cling so stoutly. It is kept afloat by many 
little bladders or air-vessels that grow among the 
numerous leaves at the upper end of the plant. 



46 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



There is a relation of this giant seaweed which 
grows farther north. It is very plentiful along the 
northwestern coast of America. Fish- 
ers in Alaska often use for a fishing- 
line the tough cord-like stem, which 
is sometimes two hundred or three 
hundred feet in length. This cousin 
of the great giant is sometimes called 
by the sailors " sea-otter's cabbage.'' 
At the top of the long stem that is 
used for a fishing-line there grows a 
large air-bladder six or seven feet long 
which buoys up the plant, and from 
the end of this great air-vessel strike 
out forty or fifty immense leaves 
\ each thirty or forty feet long, 





< 

- w 



SEA PLANTS CONTINUED. 47 

that float far out on the waves. The big furry 
sea-otter, that is found in the north Pacific ocean, 
likes to sport among these sea- 
weeds, hiding between the great 
trailing leaves as he catches the 
fish upon which he lives ; or 
when he is tired of fishing, and 
wants to rest or take a doze, 
he just climbs up on the big 
floating air-bladder, stretches 
himself out, and basks at his 
ease in the sunshine. This is 
why the funny name of " sea- 
otter's cabbage " is given to this 
seaweed. 

Along our Atlantic coast and 
in many other waters there grow 
several much smaller relations of 
the great Pacific plants. They 
are called kelp. Most of the 
sea-plants grow either from the 
bed of the sea or from rocks along A KIND OF Kelp - 
the coast. Those of you who live in eastern New 
England, or who have ever visited the seaside, 




4 8 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



must have seen, growing on the rocks in loose 
masses, a dark olive-green or brown seaweed full 
of little bladders. Perhaps you have picked from 
the sand bits that have been torn away by the 
breakers, and, after being tossed back and forth, at 
last have been dropped on the beach by the out- 
going tide. This is a rock- 
weed, and is very common in 
many parts of the world. The 
rockweeds always grow on 
rocks that are covered by salt 
water at high tide but are left 
bare at low tide. 

Other kinds of seaweeds 
always grow far enough from 

land never to be left uncovered 
Rockweed. hy water> and there are Qthers 

still that have their home in rather deep sea-water. 
But I think none that grow from the sea-bottom 
are ever found in water more than five hundred 
feet deep. Some of the most beautiful rose-colored 
and purple seaweeds are found in the deep waters. 
But besides the many varieties of plants, both 
great and small, that are fastened either to rocks 




SEA PLANTS CONTINUED. 



49 



or to the bed of the sea, there is another kind, 
closely related to the common rockweed, that is 
not attached to anything, but grows floating. It 
is a more delicately formed plant than any of 
the rockweeds, with slender leaves, and its air- 
bladders are funny little round things not bigger 
than small pepper-corns. Great floating tracts of 
this seaweed form what are called the " sargasso 
seas." You have seen them marked on your maps 
of the southern oceans ; the largest one is that 
east of the Bahama Islands, and this covers an 
immense space in the ocean, extending across the 
Atlantic nearly to the coast of Africa. There are 
many other smaller seas made by the gulf-weed, 
or sargassum, for that is the name of the plant 
which has spread itself over such large portions 
of the ocean-world. 

Many of the seaweeds are of great use to man. 
Of some, certain medicines are made. Some of 
the coarser kinds are cast on shore in quantities, 
and these are used to fertilize the farm-lands. 
The rockweed, or bladder-wrack, as it is some- 
times called, forms the chief food of horses, cattle, 
and sheep in some of the barren Scottish islands. 

4 



5o 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



Young kelp is sometimes used as food by men, 
and the so-called Irish moss that is sold to make 
blanc-mange and custard is a kind of seaweed. 
Dried seaweeds, too, are burned as fuel in some 
places where wood is scarce. None of the sea- 
weeds bear true seeds, but they all grow from 
spores. 




Gulf-weed. 



IX. 



ROBIN-WHEAT. 




Robin-wheat. 



Fairyland could never show any fields so 
dainty and lovely as those of a beautiful moss 



52 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

that the children in Northern Ohio call by the 
pretty name of " robin-wheat." If you do not 
know this particular kind imagine a cushion of 
rich red or sometimes green velvety moss from 
which rises a forest of tiny stalks, each as slender 
as a hair, and bearing at its top a little greenish 
pouch, somewhat drooping, that does not look un- 
like a kernel of grain. It is a pretty fancy of 
children that these mimic grain-fields belong to the 
robins and are harvested by them. And, no doubt, 
robins and other birds as well do help themselves 
to the small selfsown and unreaped harvests ; for 
birds find out even better than do children any- 
thing that may be eaten among the things that 
grow about them. 

The little tapering pouches, that look enough 
like grain-kernels to have given rise to the name 
" robin-wheat," are really spore-cases in which are 
borne the dust-like particles, so full of power to 
live and grow that from each one a new plant may 
arise. The mosses then, you see, are another 
group of plants that grow from spores instead of 
from seeds. By and by you may like to study 
these wonderful little spores with a microscope and 



ROBIN- WHEA T. 53 

to compare them with seeds and to find out the 
real differences between a seed and a spore. 

There are a good many kinds of moss that 
somewhat resemble the exquisite " robin-wheat." 
One kind that is very common in many parts of 
the world is sometimes called " pigeon-wheat,'' and 
in parts of New England it goes by the name of 
"bear's bread," and in other places " bear's bed," 
or sometimes simply " bear-moss." Its spore- 
cases are shaped like little urns or vases, and they 
do not droop, as do the purse-like pouches of the 
robin-wheat, but each one stands erect upon its 
stalk just as a goblet does upon its stem. From 
such a tiny cup the queen of the fairies might sip 
her honey-dew, but it would take the fruits of 
many a moss-tussock to make even a bite for old 
Mr. or Mrs. Bruin or even for one of their funny 
little cubs. So " bear's bread" doesn't seem to 
be a very suitable name for this moss ; but that of 
" bear's bed" is not so bad, for if you have ever 
rested on one of the sweet, clean, springy beds 
made by this deep green moss you will agree with 
me that any bear might be glad of such a couch. 

Each little urn or goblet is covered by a lid, and 



54 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 




Bear's-Bed Moss. 

I. The Moss with its Urn. 

II. An Urn with its cap. 

III. An Urn with cap removed. 

IV. An Urn with its cap and lid, 



over both urn and lid is 
a loose-fitting, pointed 
cap, which is blown away 
by the winds some time 
before the spores are 
ripe. This light, fringed 
cap rests over the spore- 
cup just as an extin- 
guisher does over a can- 
dle. When the spores 
are quite ripe, 
$ \ the neatly fit- 
- J JL I tine; lid of the 
cup or case 
opens, that 
they may es- 
cape and fly 
out to make 
new moss- 
beds. Try to 
find some of 
these moss 




spore-cu p s 
and see for 



ROBIN-WHEAT. 



55 



yourselves how beautifully and carefully Nature 
protects the young spores until they are ready to 
grow. But the moment the little things are free, 
they trust themselves to the wind, and there is no 
telling how far they may be carried before they 
are dropped. A whiff of the powdery spores may 
be borne by a strong wind to some volcanic island 
that is nothing but a mass of barren rock, and 
soon a soft green carpet begins to spread over the 
desolate place. The mosses require but little soil, 
and therefore they can take root in the little 
deposit of dust and finely crumbled rock that 
gathers after a time even on the naked surface 
of a volcanic island. These first mosses would 
not be the large kinds like the " bear's bed," 
but some of the fine creeping ones, such as you 
have all seen growing between the cracks in a 
brick pavement. Lichens, too, are among the very 
first living things to grow on bare rocks. They 
and mosses are both fitted to make a beginning in 
such spots, not only because they can flourish in 
a scanty soil, but also because their spores are 
so very fine and light that the wind can carry 
them long distances over the land and the sea. 



56 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



Together these modest plants gradually form a 
covering for the bare rocks, and as they decay 
they at last help to form a soil in which larger 
plants can grow. 

Mosses are found in nearly all parts of the 
world, but they grow best where it is rather damp, 

Where the air is 
too dry they can- 
not flourish at all. 
They are very old 
plants, — that is, 
they grew on the 
earth abundantly 
long before it con- 
tained ordinary 
flowering plants. 
In the colder parts 
of America and of 
Europe mosses 
grow very abun- 
dantly in some 
time laro;e coarse 




One kind of Bog-moss. 

bogs and marshes. After 



grasses, rushes, and some kinds of bushes spring 
up among the bog-moss. Year after year, as all 



ROBIN-WHEAT, 



57 



these plants drop their dead leaves or die and fall 
down into the bog, they form great beds of peat. 
This peat looks like brown earth, but it is really 
made of partly decayed moss, and leaves, and wood. 
It burns well when it is dry, and in Ireland and 
some other parts of Europe many people have no 
other fires to keep them warm or with which to do 
their cooking but those which they make of dried 
peat, or " turf," as it is often called. 



X. 

FERNS. 




A Fern. 



The beautiful 
green ferns, whose 
waving leaves you 
have often gath- 
ered with your 
own hands, are 
another group of 
plants that nei- 
ther blossom nor 
bear seeds, but 
grow from spores. 
Have you ever no- 
ticed the pretty 
little brown spots 
on the under side 
of the fern leaves? 
Sometimes they 



FERNS. 



59 



are tiny roundish dots scattered in patterns along 
the under part of the leaf or frond, — for frond is 
the name given to the leaf of the graceful ferns. 
As it is the name botanists use, and is not hard, 
suppose we say frond. In some kinds of ferns, 
instead of scattered dots you find the markings of a 
different shape, often along the scalloped edges of 
the frond. If you look for these markings in early 
spring, you will not find them ; but a little later 
you will see faint light-green spots appearing, and 
later stillthese grow brown. These spots are the 
fruit of the fern ; that is, they are little cases that 
bear the spores from which new plants will arise. 
When the spores are ripe, the little cases, in which 
they have grown, open, and then the fine spore- 
dust falls out and is carried here and there by 
every breeze. It may be that when you have gath- 
ered ferns in midsummer you have seen a brown 
powder sift over your hands. This was a shower 
of the ripened spores, shaken out as you pulled the 
fronds. 

There is a very old saying that if fern-seed fall 
upon you it will make you invisible, — that is, in 
some magic way hide you from sight. By fern-seed 



6o GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



the spores must be meant, as ferns do not have 
real seeds. It would be so easy for people to find 
out that there is no sense or truth in the saying; 
and yet do you know that many of the peasants in 
Russia and in some other countries still believe 
this queer fancy ? 

There are a great many kinds of ferns, and they 

grow in almost all 
parts of the world, 
except where the 
soil and air are 
very dry. You 
know that with 
us they grow most 
plentifully in 
damp, shaded 
places. In the 
Sandwich Islands 
and in some other 
countries, where 
the climate is very 
moist and mild, 
there are tree- 

Brazilian Tree-ferns. ferns which grow 




FERNS. 6 1 

twenty, thirty, and even forty feet high. Ages 
ago, ever so long before men lived upon the earth, 
there was a time when ferns were very abundant, 
and many of them grew so large as to form part of 
the forests of those days. We know about those 
fern-trees and other strange trees of that time 
because in the coal-beds and in the layers of rock 
found between the layers of coal there are to-day 
found perfect impressions of their leaves and bark ; 
and now and then the exact shape of a beautiful 
leaf has been kept, as the mud or sand about it 
hardened into rock, or the decaying pulp of wood 
and leaves in which it lay was pressed and baked 
into coal, deep down beneath the surface of the 
earth. 



XL 
THE WALKING-FERN. 

Did you ever see or hear of a lovely fern that is 
named the walking-fern ? Now, you must not 
think that this little plant really steps over the 
ground like a cat' or hops like a toad, but it grows 
in an odd little way of its own that has given it the 
name of the walking-fern. I think when you come 
to know the way in which it grows you will agree 
with me that this is a good name. The walking- 
fern is very particular where it lives, and so I am 
afraid that most of you will not be able to find it 
growing in your neighborhood. It likes to .make 
its home on limestone rocks, and in such places it 
grows in various parts of the United States. 

I once lived near a beautiful glen in southern 
Ohio. Along the bottom of the glen flowed a large 
brook, and some way back from the winding stream, 
on either side, rose limestone cliffs. These cliffs, 
you see, formed the sides of the glen. This was a 



THE WALKING-FERN. 



63 



wonderful place, in- which grew a great many kinds 
of forest-trees, shrubs, and in their due season 
there blossomed a multitude of wild flowers. As 
soon as the bluebirds began to sing that spring 
was at hand, all along the rocks and banks many 
kinds of ferns began to put up their heads and to 
unroll themselves from the winter's sleep, in which 
they had been curled up under the 
brown earth to keep out of Jack 
Frost's way. The wild columbine 
danced along the very edge of the 
steep gray cliffs or swung out its 
yellow and red bells from crannies 
in the rocks. The star of the scar- 
let " fire-pink" blazed here and 
there among the greenery. Then 
there was the spring-beauty, the A Ferx uxrolling - 
wind-flower, the crowfoot, the pink geranium, and 
the snowy wake-robin, and wild ginger, and wild 
roses, and ever so many kinds of violets, and scores 
and scores of other sweet growing things; and the 
borders of the brook were all green with water- 
cress, which the boys and girls used to gather and 
eat with their bread and butter. 




64 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD, 

Among the wonders of the glen was found 
the little walking-fern. It often grew in mossy 
patches, part way up the rocky walls of the glen. 
The frond of this fern is not cut, as are the 
fronds of most ferns, but looks more like the leaf 
of some flowering plant. Here is a picture of a 
frond of the walking-fern that will show you its 
shape and size. 




Leaf of Walking-fern (natural size). 

The spore-cases grow on its under side, as in 
other ferns. Now about its name. The leaves, as 
you see in the picture, taper to a slender point. 
From the tips of many of the graceful leaves little 
roots grow down into the earth, fastening the end 
of the leaf to the ground, as you may see in the 
picture. From these roots spring up new leaves, 
making a new plant. Then if a leaf of this second 
fern sends out roots there is a third plant, and so 



THE WALKING-FERN. 



65 




W 

X 

H 



66 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

on. You may have seen the long trailing shoots of 
the raspberry or of the blackberry take root at 
their tips in a similar way. Sometimes one will 
find a little village of the walking-ferns, more or 
less joined together by their rooted leaves. They 
form a sort of natural chain of the loose rosettes 
made of the pretty pointed leaves. 



XII. 



A PLANT IN ARMOR. 



I remember an odd-looking plant that when I 
was a child I liked to watch. Its name is the 
prickly pear. Here is a pic- 
ture of it. Perhaps you have 
seen it growing. Our prickly 
pear was planted in a wooden 
box filled with earth. In 
cold weather the box was car- 
ried into the warm cellar to 
keep our queer plant from 
freezing ; but as soon as the 
spring frosts were over with, it was carried into the 
garden and placed in a sunny spot, at the head of 
one of our flower-beds. The whole plant, as you 
can see by the picture, is made up of flattened oval 
joints that people sometimes incorrectly call leaves. 
A neighbor gave my mother one of these fleshy 




Branch of a Prickly Pear. 



68 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



joints, and this was half buried in the earth in 
the box. In due time tiny new joints grew out 

of the one we 
had planted, 
and when the 
new ones grew 
large, others 
sprang from 
them, and so on 
until the stiff, 
bristling crea- 
ture sprawled 
all over the 
whole top of 
the box and 
even tumbled 
over its sides. 
In time the 
prickly pear 
bore large 
primrose-yel- 
low flowers. I 
said it was a bristling creature, and you will say 
so too if you ever try to pluck one of the blossoms 




A Great Mexican Prickly Pear 



A PLANT IN ARMOR. 69 

or break off a joint ; for here and there over the 
whole plant grow little bunches of stiff short hairs 
or bristles. These are so sharp and fine that they 
easily stick into the skin of one's hand, where they 
cause a good deal of smarting. 

The prickly pear belongs to a group of plants 
called the cactus family. Botanists already know 
more than five hundred kinds of cacti, and others 
will probably be discovered in out-of-the-way places, 
Their native home is in the warm dry parts of North 
and South America. The prickly pear is hardier 
than most of the cactus tribe, and it has straggled 
northward as far as the quaint old island of Nan- 
tucket, where it is found growing wild. The prickly 
pear where it flourishes best, like many of its rela- 
tions, bears a juicy fruit that is good to eat. 

On one kind of prickly pear that grows in various 
tropical countries live multitudes of tiny little bugs. 
These are the cochineal insects, from which, when 
killed and dried, is made a beautiful red dye that is 
much used to color woollen yarns and cloth. Per- 
haps the very red mittens you wear in cold weather 
were so colored. 

The cacti are a queer-looking set of fellows. 



;o 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 




They are generally of odd, awkward shapes, have 
no leaves, but are well armed with stinging hairs, 
or prickles. Many of them bear large gay flowers. 
Some of these are white, some yellow, others pink, 
and many bright red. Some of the cacti consist 

of a single thick round 
stem, shaped somewhat 
like a melon, and for this 
reason they are called the 
" melon-cacti/' A cactus 
something like one of 
these, found in Mexico, 
was nine feet high, and 
weighed a ton. This 
plant-monster was dug up and carried across the 
ocean to some great gardens near London ; but 
he did not like being transplanted, and pined for 
the old wild home in the hot sandy soil of Mexico 
until he died. 

The fleshy stems of many kinds of cactus con- 
tain a cooling juice that both men and animals 
relish. The herds of mules, pasturing on the dry 
plains of South America, where there are great 
tracts of cactus growths, would often suffer from 



A Melon-cactus 

(much reduced in size) 
with its Flower beside it. 



A PLANT IN ARMOR. 



71 



thirst were it not for the juice of the melon-cactus. 
How do you think the mule can get at the drink 
he wants without pricking his velvet nose ? I sup- 
pose you would slice off the jagged coat with a big 
knife ; but, as you know, the mule cannot do this. 
Instead, he paws off the spines with the hoof of 




Some Tree-cacti. 



one fore-foot and then sucks the refreshing juice. 
Sometimes the sharp prickles get into the tough 
cushion inside of the under part of his hoof and 
cause him much pain. 



72 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

In some places there are real forests of tall cacti, 
some kinds growing into trees fifty or sixty feet 
high, and the stems becoming so hard and woody 
that they are cut down and used as we use the 
wood of our forest-trees. 

With all their bright blossoms, we cannot love 
the misshapen cacti as we do the sweet lacly's- 
delights of old gardens or even the brave little 
chickweed that creeps over every bit of waste 
ground it can find. But when you come to know 
that their uncanny forms and lack of leaves, and 
even their ugly prickles, are all to help these plants 
to live in desert lands, where most plants would 
die, you will like to know more about them. But 
you must wait for all this long story until you are 
older. 



XIII. 
THE LINEN PLANT. 

When I was a little girl I had a flower-bed of 
my own where grew a good many different kinds 
of plants. I liked to plant strange seeds and see 
what would come up. One day I saw some 
smooth, shiny, brown flax-seed, and asked for a 
little to sow in my flower-bed. In due time some 
plantlets came up in the spot where I had covered 
the flax-seed with earth, and in a little while I had 
several thrifty, slender stalks of flax. My father 
noticed them one day, and told me that he wished 
I could see a whole field of flax. He said, " I 
know of no prettier sight than a flax-field in full 
bloom. " Then he told me of the blue color of the 
flowers and of the use made of the stalks. After 
that, I eagerly waited for my few plants to bloom. 
By and by I saw some buds among the leaves, and 
one bright morning, when I went to the garden, 
there was one sky-blue flower wide open. Others 



74 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT- WORLD. 



followed, and I had great pleasure in tending and 
watching my garden flax. But I often thought of 
what my father had told me, and longed to see a 
great field covered with the lovely blue blossoms. 

At last it came about that I was to go with my 
father to make a visit at the home of some friends 
living several miles in the country. /VVe were to 
drive in an open buggy, and as the road led, most 
of the way, through woods and thinly settled farm- 
lands, it was a beautiful ride. We started very 
early one sunny June morning. I asked a great 
many questions about the different birds we saw 
and heard, the various crops growing in the fields ; 
and when we stopped to let old George, the horse, 
rest in some shady bit of woods, my father taught 
me to know the forest trees about us. We were 
near the end of our pleasant journey, when all at 
once I saw, on one side of the road, something that 
made me start and cry out with joy, " Oh, see 
there! What is that? Is it flax ? " For there 
before my eyes was a broad level field of some- 
thing as blue as the June sky above us. I was 
told that this was really flax in bloom. As the 
gentle summer wind softly blew over it, tossing 



THE LINEN PLANT 



75 



ever so lightly the masses of delicate flowers borne 
so gracefully on the slight stems, I thought I had 
never in all my life seen any- 
thing so beautiful. All I had 
dreamed of the beauty of a 
flax-field was more than real- 
ized. A single flower is very 
lovely both in shape and color, 
but acres of plants must be 
seen to give the full effect of 
their beauty. 

An old name for flax, still 
often used in Scotland, is 
" lint" A pretty Scotch verse 
says, "When the lint is in 
the bell." The bright flowers 
are somewhat bell-shaped, and 
the poet means when the flax 
is full of its swaying bell- 
flowers. 

Flax has been cultivated for 
thousands of years to make linen thread and cloth. 
When at the right age, the plants are pulled and 
laid on the ground in neat bunches. After dry- 




A Flax-blossom. 



y6 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

ing, the flax is stripped of its seeds and soaked in 
water until it partly decays ; but the tough fibres 
of which linen is made do not decay, but only grow 
soft and pliable. Then the softened flax is beaten 
and cleansed in various ways, and is combed out 
straight and smooth with metal combs. Finally 
it is spun into thread on the pretty little spinning- 
wheels such as our grandmothers used. 1 You 
have perhaps seen such wheels in old attics, or 
possibly in a parlor or hall, for ladies now like them 
as ornaments. All our fine table-cloths and nap- 
kins and many other useful articles are made of 
the linen thread by weaving it into cloth. 

1 The different kinds of linen cloth of commerce are generally 
made not from flax spun on the pretty old-fashioned wheel, but 
from that spun by machinery in great factories. In many parts of 
northern Europe, in Great Britain, and even in a few out-of-the 
way portions of our own country, however, this charming old 
handicraft of spinning with the little flax-wheel is still carried on, 




XIV. 

SUMMARY. 

It seems as though we had now talked a little 
about a good many kinds of plants, does n't it ? 
But really we have only spoken of some of the 
great classes into which botanists have divided 
the plant-world. Each one of these large classes 
contains many — some more, some less — sub- 
classes, and each of these smaller divisions often 
contains more kinds of plants than you can 
imagine. Beginning with the speck of a yeast- 
plant, so tiny that your eyes cannot see a single 
one of the little living things without the help of a 
microscope, we have come on, taking just a peep 
at the moulds, toadstools, lichens, and the lovely 
and strange plants growing both in fresh and in 
salt water, to the dear robin-wheat and its kind, 
and the beautiful fern-tribe, all of which grow 
without either blooming or bearing seeds. The 



78 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



tiny yeast-plant was the simplest of all, you re- 
member, being nothing but a soft little cell which 
we know to be alive because it can give rise to 
others like itself. The yeast and many others of 
the flowerless plants may seem but little like the 
things which you have all your lives been accus- 
tomed to call plants. For those which you have 
always known by that name grow from seeds, have 
roots and stems, and usually branches and leaves, 
and bear flowers that ripen seeds ; but the bother- 
some moulds that creep over your boots and over 
stale bread, as well as all the toadstools, and the 
lichens that soften and beautify the hard rocks and 
old stumps and fences, the green " frog-spit " of 
pools, the seaweeds of the ocean, and the green 
ferns with their embroidery of tiny spore-cases are 
just as much living plants as is the prickly pear 
with its gay flowers or the graceful flax, laden with 
its skyey bells. 

I hope you will notice every one of the flower- 
less plants that comes in your way, whether it 
be a smart little toadstool or some spreading 
lichen or green moss or fern, and find out all 
you can about them and their ways of life. But 



SUMMARY. 



79 



as the whole story of how plants support them- 
selves and grow would be rather hard for you 
now to follow, we will for the present talk over a 
little some easier things about flowering plants, 
with which you are already somewhat familiar. 

It would be a good thing if we could sow seeds 
and study their changes from the day they are 
buried in the damp earth until the plants that grow 
from them have perfected new seeds ; and this you 
will all do, I hope, when you study botany. But 
in these little talks it seems best only to call your 
attention to things that you can all easily see for 
yourselves in your play or walks. So, leaving the 
wonderful story of how baby plants rise from seeds, 
and how plants eat, drink, breathe, move, climb, 
swim, sleep, wake up, and gradually change their 
colors or their dress, and even put on armor as a 
defence against enemies, and set traps to catch 
their prey, — for all these things and more are 
done by plant-people, — let us try to see how a 
flower is made up, and how it perfects its seeds, 
and notice some of the contrivances by which 
Nature scatters ripened seeds over the wild woods 
and pastures. 



XV. 

THE PARTS OF THE FLOWER. 

Each year that you have lived, you have seen 
the buds on the apple-trees swell in the gentle 
spring rain and the warm sun, and at last burst 
out into full bloom ; you have smelled the sweet 
fragrance and seen the apples growing, that come 
after the flowers : and yet I think if you will 
now gather a few blossoms and find what I point 
out, you will see some new and interesting things 
about this common flower. A little girl once 
asked me if it were not wicked to gather these 
beautiful blossoms, as each one, if left on the 
tree, would grow into an apple before September. 
This was a very nice, kind thought ; but Nature 
is so generous in all she does, children, that she 
has her plants bear a great many more flowers 
than could possibly mature into seed or fruit. 
In this way Nature provides for accidents. So 
we need not hesitate to take as many of the 



THE PARTS OF THE FLOWER. 8 1 

abundant apple-blossoms as we like, to study. I 
should not idly pluck them, or any flowers, be- 
cause, unless gathered for some useful purpose, 
they had, it seems to me, better be allowed to 
end their little lives uninterrupted. 

Before we talk over the parts of the flower, 
can you tell me what is the use of the apple- 
blossom ? " To make apples grow," I think I 
hear you say. If you look in the middle of a 
ripe apple, what do you always find ? " Seeds," 
you will tell me. Yes, the seeds ; and from 
these seeds, if planted in the earth, will grow 
little apple-trees. Then you must remember that 
the real use or work of the flower of any plant 
is to make seeds. Now please turn your apple- 
blossom upside down, and you will see a little 
hard, berry-like thing at the end of the stem ; 
and this ends, you see, in five small points, which 
act as a tiny bouquet-holder for the rest of the 
flower. This outside part of the flower is called 
the calyx. The five little points are called the 
calyx teeth. In many flowers, as in the flax, 
the calyx is made up of several separate leaf-like 
parts that are called sepals; but in others the 

6 



82 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



sepals are more or less grown together. In the 
apple they are grown together more than half- 
way ; in the trumpet-creeper they are much more 
united into one piece, making a vase or cup for 
the flower, while in the strawberry the sepals are 
separate until very near the base, where they unite. 

Now, what do we find 
just within the calyx ? 
I fancy I see ever so 
many fingers touching 
the five pinkish-white, 
shell-shaped parts which 
you often call " leaves. " 
You must remember 
that these are called 
petals. The petals of a flower are together called 
the corolla. Corolla means a little crown. If you 
cannot always remember the name " corolla," I am 
quite sure that you can remember that its sepa- 
rate parts are the petals. In some flowers these 
grow together, making what is known as a one- 
petaled flower. 

When the sepals grow together, making one 
piece for the calyx, the flower is said to be one- 




An Apple-blossom with 
one side cut away. 



THE PARTS OF THE FLOWER. 83 

sepaled. The flower of the scarlet honeysuckle 

and the larger ones of the trumpet-creeper are 

good examples of one- 

petaled blossoms. You all 

know plenty more, such 

as the morning-glory, the 

foxglove, and the harebell. 

If you look at one of the 

gorgeous flowers of the 

trumpet-creeper, you will 

see that the margin is cut 

into five scallops. These 

tell how many separate 

petals there would have 

been if they had not grown 

together to make the gay, 

trumpet-Shaped blossom. A Oxe-petaled Flower. 

I wonder if you have ever thought why some 
flowers are so gayly colored? Many people im- 
agine that this show of color is just for the sake 
of pleasing human beings ; but you may be sure 
that the bright color and also the sweet scent of a 
flower are of use to the plant, else they would not 
be there. Pretty soon we shall see what this use is. 




84 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

Now look inside the petals of your apple-blossom 
and you will see a number of tiny greenish stalks, 
each one bearing at its tip a little yellow ball. 
If you strike your flower against a pane of glass 
or on your sleeve, a yellow dust will be left. 
These little people with yellow heads are called 
stamens, and the dust or powder which they shed 
is pollen. The pollen of some flowers is not yel- 
low, — as you will find if you smell of a tiger-lily 
and get your nose dabbled with its brown pollen. 

Once more turn to your apple-blossom ; look 
down in the midst of the stamens and see if you 
do not find five little things standing close to- 
gether. If you were to examine with a magni- 
fying-glass these small stalks which do not have 
the yellow tops, you would find that they are joined 
together at the bottom. This part of a flower is 
called the pistil. Some flowers have a pistil 
with just one stalk, while others, like the apple- 
blossom, have what you may call a compound 
pistil, because it is made of several parts, more 
or less joined together. If we were to split each 
of these parts of the pistil carefully from top to 
bottom, on looking at them through a magnifying- 



THE PARTS OF THE FLOWER. 



85 



glass we should find a little cell at the bottom of 
each. So that the whole lower part of this com- 
pound pistil is like a tiny house with five rooms, 
all of just the same size; and in each little cell 
or room are two very, very little objects which 
by-and-by will grow and ripen into seeds. 

If we cut an apple 
crosswise through its 
middle, the five seed- 
cells can be seen, mak- 
ing a star. Each part 
of the star is one cell, 
and if the apple is cut 
straight through, the 
brown, ripened seeds 
within the cells will also 
be cut in two. Then, in a ripe apple, we have the 
lower part of the pistil and the calyx of an apple- 
blossom of last spring grown together. They are 
greatly enlarged since the flowering days, for they 
grew all the long summer through. The five little 
calyx-teeth do not grow. But look on an apple 
opposite the stem, and you will easily find the 
little, drled-up, leaf-like points still clinging to 




An Apple cut lengthwise. 

C Remains of the calyx-teeth. 

E One seed-cell. 

T Thickened base of the calyx. 



86 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

the calyx, which has grown from the small green, 
berry-like thing into a large juicy, fragrant apple. 1 
The lower part of the pistil, that contains the 
seeds, is called by botanists the ovary. The word 
ovary comes from a Latin word which means "a 
place where eggs are kept." The early botanists 
probably chose this name for the seed-box of a 
plant because eggs and seeds are a good deal 
alike ; that is, a plant grows from a seed, just 
as a fish, a turtle, or a bird grows from an egg. 

Not all flowers contain the various parts that 
you find in the apple-blossom. In many the 
petals are wanting, and in that case the calyx is 
generally bright colored instead of green. But 
in some flowers we find neither calyx nor corolla. 
In many plants the stamens and pistils are found 
in separate flowers ; that is, some of the flowers 
will contain the pollen-bearing stamens, while 
others will bear the pistils, but have no stamens. 
A blossom that is made up of calyx, corolla, sta- 
mens, and pistils is said to be a complete flower. 

1 Sometimes the withered remnants of the upper part of the 
pistils can also be found inside the calyx-teeth. 



XVI. 
HOW SEEDS ARE PERFECTED. 

The stamen-dust or pollen has a use of its own. 
Unless some of this were to fall on top of the pistil 
or pistils, the baby-seeds, growing down in their 
little rooms, would never come to be perfect seeds 
that could grow and make new plants. When any 
of the pollen chances to fall upon the pistil, for 
some reason — which no one, however wise, can tell 
us — a sort of thread, so fine that you can scarcely 
imagine it, grows out of each little grain of pollen, 
and creeps down through the pistil-stalk to where 
the young seeds are, and in some way makes them 
able to become perfect seeds. If you ask me how 
and why, I must tell you I do not know how all 
this can come about. It is one of Nature's secrets. 

The stalk of a pistil is called the style ; the 
enlarged tip of the style is the stigma. In many 
flowers there is no style, or pistil-stalk ; but the 



88 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 




stigma, which is usually rough, and often some- 
what moist, rests on the ovary or seed-case. 
One strange thing people have found out, and 

that is, that the pollen- 
dust from the stamens 
of any flower does not, 
as a rule, answer well 
on the stamens of that 
very flower, but pollen 
from another flower is 
better ; and the best of 
all is that which even 
comes from another 
tree or plant of the same 
kind. Now how is the 
pollen from one flower 
to get to the pistils of 
other flowers, even to 
flowers growing on sep- 

i. A Pollen-grain, greatly mag- arate plants? The 

2, Same, beginning to send out a o r 

tube - have no feet with which 

3. Same, with a long tube. 

to walk and no wings 
with which to fly, and yet they do travel about 





HO IV SEEDS ARE PERFECTED. 89 

just as is necessary in order to make seeds which 
will produce new plants. Let us try to discover 
how this comes to pass. I think you will say 
that it is as interesting as a fairy tale. 

Seeds that when sown will sprout and produce 
new plants are said to be fertile ; so the work of 
carrying the pollen from the stamens of one flower 
to the pistils of another is called fertilization, 
Many flowers bear pollen so dry and powdery 
that when the stamens are ripe enough to shed 
their precious dust it is easily blown about by the 
wind, just as are the spores of the moulds, mush- 
rooms, ferns, and other flowerless plants. Those 
of you who live where pines and other evergreen- 
trees grow, may have seen, in blooming-time, show- 
ers of their pollen carried along by the wind. Go 
into a field of Indian corn when it is in flower, or 
as the farmers say, has tasselled, when there is a 
good breeze, and you can see the light pollen drift- 
ing about in the air. Such plants have no trouble 
in sending their pollen far and wide. Wind-ferti- 
lized plants, too, almost always have their stigmas 
branched, plumed, feathery, or of some shape and 
kind well fitted to catch, as they settle, the parti-' 




go GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD ; 

cles of pollen floating in the air. Most of the 
grains and grasses, the hazels, alders, and many 
other plants which you can easily 
observe, are fertilized by the wind, 
and their stigmas are fashioned so 
as to help on the useful work. 

One of the most beautiful adap- 
tations of this kind is to be seen 
in the silk of corn. You have all 
seen the blossoms of the Indian 

Wind-fertilized Com, away Up at the top of the 
Pistil of Wheat. , n j i i .% 

stalk ; and you have also seen the 
silk that is inside the corn-husks. The silk, you 
know, always hangs out a little way in a tassel 
at the end of the ear of corn. Will you not say 
that it is wonderful, when I tell you that every 
thread of the soft, pretty corn-silk is the stalk or 
style of a pistil ? These pistils purposely fall out- 
side the green husks in order that their stigmas 
may catch the pollen, which the wind carries from 
the stamens, which are found in the blossoms that 
are borne so far above the pistils. Each speck of 
pollen, after falling upon che stigma of a strand 
of the corn-silk, must send its threadlike tube 



HOW SEEDS ARE PERFECTED, 



91 



all the way down through the length of the silk 
to the little one-celled ovary at its base. This 
ovary is what we call the young kernel of corn. If 
the pollen fails to alight on a single stigma at the 
outer end of a thread of corn-silk, the tiny kernel 
for that thread will wither and dry up, so as to 
make what the farmers call a "deaf" kernel, such 
as we see scattered here and there through an ear 
of corn. 

I want you to be sure to notice that the ever- 
green trees, the grains, grasses, sedges, and other 
wind-fertilized plants have small blossoms, usually 
green or brown, which without careful observation 
you would scarcely know to be flowers. In gen- 
eral, these plants have no trouble in sending their 
dry pollen-dust far and wide by the wind; but the 
pollen-grains in the blossoms of many classes of 
plants are more or less sticky. The wind could 
not easily catch and carry such damp, clinging 
particles. Then too there are other flowers that 
have taken such shapes that their stamens are shut 
away from the wind. In many of these flowers 
whose pollen the wind may not scatter, the stamens 
do not shed their pollen at the same time that the 



92 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

pistils are ready to receive it ; and again the sta- 
mens and pistils are borne in separate flowers, or 
even on separate plants. Besides, as I told you, 
many flowers cannot perfect their seeds unless 
pollen be brought to the pistils from the stamens 
of other flowers. But Nature has arranged for this 
necessary work of carrying pollen from flower to 
flower, or from plant to plant, in the most curious 
and interesting way. 



XVII. 

HOW FLOWERS HIRE THEIR POLLEN 
CARRIED. 

What are the bees and wasps and butterflies so 
busy about, as they fly among fruit-trees in full 
bloom, or above the garden flower-beds, or over 
the clover-fields ? " Gathering honey," you will 
say, and that is true, as far as it goes ; but these 
pretty flying travellers are doing more than merely 
feasting and lading themselves with honey, as you 
call it, to bear home. The correct name for the 
sweet liquid found in many flowers is nectar, and 
the part of the flower that secretes and holds the 
nectar is called the nectary. The bee sucks the 
nectar, swallows it into his crop, where it is some- 
what changed, then pumps it up, empties it into 
the cells of the honey-comb, — and this is really 
honey. 

I wonder if you know in what part of a flower 
the nectar usually is kept ? I am pretty sure that 



94 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



you as well as insects know where to find it in the 
red clover, in the sweet locust-flowers, and in the 
curving spurs of the columbine ; for children gen- 
erally are fond of sucking the nectar from these 
flowers. It is the base or lower part of each slen- 




der clover-blossom that must be nipped off to get 
at the dainty droplet which it contains. Now bees 
and other honey or nectar gathering insects have 
had long experience at this work, and know very 
well where to find what they seek. As a bee 
makes his way down into a flower to sip its nectar, 
must he not push his head and shoulders against 
the stamens and pistils ? If the pollen be ripe, 
some of the grains shaken from the stamens will 
pretty certainly stick to the bee, particularly if he 
wears a velvet coat. Suppose a bee or other insect 
to get well powdered with pollen, in his visit to 
a flower, do you see what will happen as he 
dips down into another blossom ? As he brushes 



HOW POLLEN IS CARRIED. 95 

against its pistils, very likely some of the tiny 
grains of pollen on his head or body will be dis- 
lodged, and if ever so little fall on the pistil of the 
second flower, a useful work has been done ; for in 
this way the seeds growing down in the ovary will 
be made fertile. How useful to flowers the bees, 
butterflies, and many other insects are ! When 
Jack learned how pollen is carried about by insects, 
he said he thought we might call them Nature's 
little foot-pages, because they do her errands for 
her. 

Of course the pollen of one flower would do no 
good if dropped upon the pistils of a different kind of 
flower, but very often many plants of the same kind 
grow near together ; and besides, bees and butter- 
flies prefer to visit only one particular kind of plant 
at a time. Then, too, not all nectar-bearing plants 
yield their delicate food to every insect that comes 
along. Certain plants hide the nectar in a deep 
cup or spur, quite out of reach of all insects except 
special ones that are particularly adapted to secure 
the nectar of these very plants. Bees not only 
seek nectar, but pollen also, which they gather and 
tuck away in little shallow pockets on their hind 



96 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT^WORLD. 

legs. The golden pollen-dust is taken to the hive 
or nest, emptied out of the curious pockets, and 
mixed by the bees with honey into a soft brown 
paste. This queer-flavored mixture is packed away 
in cells and kept as food, particularly for the young 
bees. It is called bee-bread. Just here let me tell 
you that the very flowers which bear nectar, or 
honey, as you call it, are the ones which are sweet- 
smelling, or which have bright-colored petals, — 
sometimes are both sweet and gay-colored. 

Now can you guess the use of the showy ban- 
ners hung out by so many plants ? They are sig- 
nals to say to insects, " Honey is here ; honey is 
here ! Come and sip it ; come and sip it ! I '11 
give you sweet nectar if you '11 carry my pollen to 
my neighbors and fetch theirs to me," And right 
glad are the little nectar-loving creatures to take 
advantage of the offer of the flowers ; and the 
flowers, too, may thank the bearers of their pollen- 
freight, for without this help many species would 
soon die out. In some countries the red clover 
sets no seeds, because there are no bumble-bees. 
The proboscis of the hive-bee is not long enough 
to reach the nectar, and therefore they do not visit 



HOW POLLEN LS CARRLED. 



97 



these flowers. In parts of Central America the 
same thing is said to be true, and for the same 
reason, of the scarlet runner, the beautiful flower- 
ing bean that is common in yards and gardens. 
So if there were no bumble-bees in any part of the 
world both the red clover and the scarlet runner 
would die for lack of fertile seeds to keep up the 
stock. 

I am very sorry to have to tell you that there are 
some rogues among bees which do not pay for their 
nectar. Such nectar-thieves bite holes through the 
lower part of the flower into the nectary and steal 
what they wish, instead of going, as they should 
do, to the open flower and sucking up the nec- 
tar, then paying. for it by carrying pollen to other 
blossoms. This is a very mean thing for bumble- 
bees or for any insect to do ; for there is an old 
bargain between flowering plants and certain little 
animals that the former shall give their nectar to 
the latter as payment for bearing their pollen. 
For thousands and thousands of years before 
men lived on the earth this traffic was going on, 
wherever there were flowering plants and insects. 
And it is to this long-standing commerce that we 



g8 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD, 

owe the lilies, sweet-peas, and larkspurs of our 
flower borders ; the snow-white flowers of the 
buckwheat, and the delicate blue ones of the 
flax, that cover cultivated fields ; the velvet mul- 
leins and brave old thistles, all bristling with ar- 
mor, of our roadsides ; the daisies and buttercups 
and violets that bedeck the meadows and pas- 
tures ; the geraniums and orchids of the woods ; 
the blazing cardinal-flowers and spice-scented aza- 
leas of low lands ; the wild roses and laurels of 
hillsides and mountain lands ; and the multi- 
tudes of beautiful blooming things that make the 
world lovely, and that load the air with fragrance. 

Flowers not only hail passing insects by send- 
ing out fragrant odors and fluttering gay petals 
or sepals, as the case may be, but many of them 
have distinct markings that guide the insect-visi- 
tors directly to the nectary. You have all seen 
many flowers whose corolla is marked with dots, 
lines, or circles of a different color. Flowers that 
only open after twilight, and whose seeds are fer- 
tilized by night-moths, do not have the path- 
finders, as we call the lines or color-spots that 
point the way to the nectar ; but look at your 



HOW POLLEX IS CARRIED. 



99 



nasturtiums, pansies, hollyhocks, sweet-williams, 
and oxalis, and you will easily find the insect- 
guides. 

In many blossoms with irregularly shaped cor- 
ollas, such as the large ones of the foxglove and 
the catalpa, or the small blue ones of the ground- 
ivy, and of most of the mint tribe, the lower lip 
is beautifully marked with bright dots, lines, or 
mottlings. It is on this lower lip, or " doorstep," 
as some one has called it, that the nectar or pol- 
len seeker alights before entering the throat of 
the flower, and where he pauses as he comes out 
to brush off some of the pollen, and, maybe, to 
fill his pollen baskets, before flitting away. 







XVIII. 
SOME POLLEN-CARRIERS. 

I have just told you something about how 
flowers hire some insects to work for them ; but 
perhaps you want to know just what insects these 
are that carry pollen for flowers. Well, there are 
other animals besides insects at work for flowers. 
Snails, creeping about from plant to plant, some- 
times take a little pollen along with them as they 
go, and so help in fertilizing seeds. The hum- 
ming-birds, so lovely on account of their shim- 
mering play of colors, as they dart from one 
flower to another, and poise themselves for a 
moment in front of each, while they dip their 
slender bills down into the nectaries, are carrying 
grains of pollen on their exquisite little heads. 
In this way they help to fertilize the petunia and 
the trumpet-honeysuckle, and perhaps they do all 
the fertilizing for the dainty touch-me-not and 
the great blossoms of the trumpet-creeper. 



SOME POLLEN-CARRIERS. IO i 

But, after all, most of the pollen trade is car- 
ried on by insects. You may sometimes find 
grasshoppers, and often find ants, prowling about 
in flowers ; but they are greedy pollen-eaters, and 
their bodies are so smooth that but little pollen 
sticks to them, so they are not of much use to 
the flowers, and often do far more harm than good. 

The beetles are a little better, for some of 
them are hairy, so that pollen sticks to them, 
and they carry a good deal of it from blossom 
to blossom. There are a few flowers that de- 
pend mainly on beetles to fertilize them. 

Then there are the flies, and especially the 
bee-flies, that do a great deal for flowers. Most 
flies, as every one knows, are very fond of sweets, 
and most of them have a long 
ish tongue with which to lap 
up nectar. But the queer bee- 
flies are famously provided for 
in this way. Look at the long 
tongue which this bee-fly has, The Bee " Fly - 

and see how easily he could reach it down into 
any nectary that was not unusually deep. Then 
what a velvety fellow he is ! And this hairy 




102 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

nap would be sure to catch a great deal of pol- 
len and carry it away. 

Butterflies and moths are of much more im- 
portance to flowers than the insects of which I 
have just been telling you; for many moths, and 
all butterflies, live entirely on nectar, and so they 
must visit flowers very often." Then they are 
covered with tiny feather-shaped % scales (such as 
come off on your fingers when you take hold of 
one of these insects), so that pollen clings to 
them very easily. Children know very well what 
a long slender proboscis the but- 
terfly carries. When it is not in 
use, the proboscis is curled up 
like a watch-spring ; but it can 
be unrolled in an instant, and 
thrust deep down into the nectary 
of a flower. The great hawk- 
moths, or sphinx-moths, have still 
head of Butterfly longer probosces. The largest 

(s owing pio )scis). mot ] 1 Q f ^jg kj nc | j.^ j s f ounc J J n 

the Northern United States has a proboscis five 
or six inches long, and one has been found in 
Brazil with a proboscis about eleven inches long. 




SOME POLLEN-CARRIERS. 103 

Such moths have special flowers that have adapted 
themselves to be fertilized by the .one particular 
kind of moth. The nectary of these flowers is 
far down, out of reach of common insects. Butter- 
flies do all their work by day. Some moths visit 
flowers by day, but most of them in the evening, 
just at and after dusk. 

The stinging insects — wasps and bees — are 
among the best of all the friends of flowers. 
Wasps are not such useful helpers to them as 
bees, because they feed on many other kinds of 
food besides nectar, and would rather cluster on 
a cracked pear or a peach that has fallen to the 
ground and burst open, than visit the sweetest 
bed of pinks, or the most beautiful rosebush, that 
ever bloomed. But the bees are the very best 
friends to the flower world. There are so many 
kinds of bees, and so many bees of each kind, 
that they can do a vast deal of work. Every 
flower in every head of clover in the broadest 
field, every apple and cherry blossom in the 
largest orchard, may have its bee-callers drop in 
for a second many times in a single day. Bees 
visit small flowers that the painted butterflies 



io4 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



and the darting hawk-moths would think quite 
beneath their notice. Even where there is no 
nectar, the bees will go to get pollen ; and though 
they put most of it in their hip-pockets, they 
may carry enough about on their heads and 
bodies to fertilize the next flower that they en- 
ter. I would try to tell you about these pockets, 
but they are such odd, shallow things that even 
looking at a picture of them would give you only 
a very poor idea of their shape. You must watch 
bees at work among the flowers, and see for your- 
selves how the pollen is packed away in the little 
basket-shaped enclosures of stiff hairs that make 
the pockets. 

In the last lesson I told you that flowers had 
hung out their bright colors to attract insects, 
and this is largely for the sake of the bees. Sir 
John Lubbock, a famous English naturalist, has 
made some very interesting experiments, by which 
he has proved that bees do distinguish colors, 
and are especially fond of the bright ones. But- 
terflies are even more refined in their tastes and 
particular in their choice of colors. Beetles, too, 
are great lovers of color. 



SOME POLLEN-CARRIERS. 



105 



There are so many special arrangements by 
which flowers have adapted themselves to be fer- 
tilized by insects, that numbers of books have 
been written about the subject. But there is 
room here to show you only just one of these 
curious devices. In the picture are two flowers 
of the Salvia. The left-hand flower, A, is younger 




Flowers of Salvia, 
one visited by a bee. 

than the right-hand one, B. The stamens in A 
are matured, but the pistil is not. It is hidden 
in the upper lip, to the left of the letters st. 
The pollen-bearing part of the stamens is hinged 
in such a way that it swings very easily; and 
when a bee enters the flower, the two sides of a 
stamen are tilted down over his back so as to 



106 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

clasp it tightly. You can see one half of the 
stamen lying against the bee's side, just above 
his hind leg. Now, when he flies to another 
older flower, like B, and crawls in from its lower 
lip, his sides will brush against the tip of the 
pistil, which you see hanging down at st> and 
the flower will be fertilized. Is n't this flower 
wonderfully suited to receive and to profit by 
visits from bees ? 

" So sweet, so sweet the roses in their blowing, 
So sweet the daffodils, so fair to see ; 
So blithe and gay the humming-bird a-going 
From flower to flower a-hunting with the bee." 



XIX. 

A BUMBLE-BEE IN A 
LION'S MOUTH. 

Have you any snap- 
dragons in your flower- 
bed ? If not, I dare say 
you know these gay, odd- 
shaped blossoms. I sup- 
pose the flower must have 
seemed to somebody like a 
dragon's mouth about to 
snap at or bite some in- 
truder, and so probably 
arose the usual name of 
snap-dragon for this 
plant; although, 
since no one, as far as 
know, has ever seen a re 
live dragon, it might 
rather hard to tell just how \ 




v S 



1 08 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



one's head would look. But perhaps everybody 
has a pretty clear notion of the way a dragon 
ought to appear, from the wonderful imaginary 

pictures that we 
have all seen of a 
great, roaring crea- 
ture all covered 
with scales, with 
claw-like feet, flap- 
ping wings, a fierce, 
open mouth, and 
fiery eyes. I used 
to hear these flow- 
ers called lion- 
mouths. The chil- 
dren liked to pluck 
one, and pinching 

A Snap-Dragon Blossom. it between the 

thumb and forefinger, to hold it toward a play- 
mate, opening and closing the lips of the flower 
by the movement of the thumb and finger. When 
the lips are thus held open there is a considerable 
resemblance to the open mouth of a lion or some 
other animal. If you have ever thus played 




A BUMBLE-BEE IN A LION'S MOUTH, i Q g 

" making mouths" with the blossoms of the snap- 
dragon, you have already learned that the lips 




A "Lion-Mouth." 

(Made by holding the flower upside down and pinching it open.) 

are so firmly closed that it requires considerable 
effort to open them enough to show the deep 
throat of the flower. The nectary is at the very 
base of this, as you will find if you pull away 
the calyx and bite off the least little nip of the 
blossom, for then you will taste the sweet nectar. 
Now let me tell you what I saw last summer 
while watching some snap-dragons. There was a 
great bed of them, and what a mass of varied color 
they made ! There were all manner of red shades, 
maroon, scarlet, crimson, and pink ; then there 



HO GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

were orange flowers and pale lemon-colored ones, 
and white ones and others of mottled pink and 
white. Most varieties had a velvety bit of rich 
yellow on the lower lip of the blossom. I had not 
been five minutes beside this flower-bed, watching 
the gentle courtesying of the tall stalks loaded 
above with buds and bright flowers, and thickly 
clad below with dark-green leaves, before some 
flying visitors came. I was very near the flowers, 
but kept quite still, and the winged things did not 
seem to mind me or be disturbed by my presence. 
A medium-sized bumble-bee came straight toward 
the flowers, not as if he were aimlessly wandering, 
but just as if he knew where he was going and 
what he was after, and I doubt not he did. After 
nosing about two or three blossoms, all the while 
humming and bumbling to himself, he pushed his 
head under the lip of a full-blown flower and then 
burrowed his way down into the throat. None 
but a strong insect could force an entrance into 
the closed throat or tube. The bumble-bee made 
a great scratching with his legs, as he persever- 
ingly worked his way toward the nectary to get 
the sweet droplet for which he came. In a mo- 



A BUMBLE-BEE IN A LION'S MOUTH, m 

ment or two I saw him backing out, his head com- 
ing out last ; he paused just a moment on the 
lip of the flower to brush off with his legs some 
of 'the yellow pollen with which he was well pow- 
dered. This cleaning off of the pollen-grains was 
most deftly done, and at once recalled Jean Inge- 
low's pretty verse : — 

11 O velvet bee, you 're a dusty fellow, 
You 've powdered your legs with gold ! " 

On either hind leg I saw a roundish little ob- 
ject as yellow as gold; these were the tiny open- 
work hair baskets, packed with pollen. I saw 
dozens of bumble-bees of several different kinds 
come and go in an hour. All behaved pretty 
much alike, though some of them on backing out 
of the blossom were silent, while others kept up 
a sort of querulous buzzing. 

Other smaller, weaker insects, — flies and some 
very small kinds of bees, — came to the bed of 
snap-dragons, but although they tried they were 
unable to enter the fresh flowers. I saw some 
of these feebler creatures crawl into old flowers 
that had lost their spring by partially withering. 
Probably most of these insects came to eat pol- 



112 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



len. Gardeners have found that 
if, during their flowering sea- 
son, snap-dragons are protected 
from bees, by closely covering 
them with netting, they will 
mature no perfect seeds ; but 
if left free to receive visits from 
their trusty friends, the bum- 
ble-bees, they send their pollen 
by them from flower to flower 
and from one bed to another, 
paying the busy bustling fel- 
lows with nectar and pollen. 
When Jack Frost comes to tell 
the late buds on the tips of the 
flower-stalks that blooming time 
is over, the irregularly rounded 
seed-vessels are full of little ripe 
black seeds which are sifted out 
over the ground (if you don't 
gather them) through three little 
chinks that open for this very 
purpose. Snap-dragons must 
like to amuse themselves by 



A BUMBLE-BEE IN A LION'S MOUTH. 113 




grimacing; for after spending their flowering days 
in making dragon-mouths, or lion-mouths, or what 
you will, they end their innocent 
lives by turning their brown seed- 
pouches into the queerest little 
elfish faces, — some look like tiny 
monkeys, others like laughing 
little imps. Two of the seed- 
openings make the eyes, the third 
little slit forms the mouth, and 
near the middle of the triangle 
made by eyes and mouth clings 
the withered style, which makes 
the funniest little nose that ever 
you saw. Each little brown, ^ 

dwarfish face is crowned with ^^F^ss 
the dried-up calyx, that makes a 
pointed cap like those worn in 
old times by a kings jester. 







XX. 

A MOTH'S VISIT. 

"You night moths that hover where honey brims over." 

It was in the early twilight one clear, warm 
summer evening that an old moth peeped out 
from under the cap-board of a fence where he had 
lain concealed during the hot sunshine of the day ; 
and after his great eyes, which are set so far out 
on his head, saw that the last ray of the sun had 
disappeared, he came out from his hiding-place. 
He stretched out his wings, saying to himself, 
" Now, perhaps I can with some comfort go and 
find something to eat, and enjoy the evening air, 
made so sweet by some of our flower-friends. 
There is little peace for us moths in flying, so 
long as all those sun-loving creatures, the bees, 
wasps, and flies, are buzzing about in one's path, 
and like enough crawling down into the very 
flower-cup into which I might have a fancy to dip 



A MOTH'S VISIT. 



115 



my proboscis. It was very, very wise of my ances- 
tors that they agreed ages ago to scatter pollen for 
certain plants on condition that their nectar should 
be kept secure from the whole tribe of plundering 
bees, and even from our relatives the brilliant but- 
terflies, since they, too, choose to go abroad only 
when the sun shines. I should n't wonder if it is 




Our Sphinx Moth that visits the Evening Primrose. 

just to show off their fine clothes ! And so, for a 
longer time than any of us moths can count, a good 
many blossoms hide their nectar away in long 
tubes, or spurs, out of the reach of these busy 
meddlers that are forever flitting hither and thither 
in the daytime ; but even this precaution of shut- 
ting our sweet food up in deep cups, fashioned for 



Il6 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

this very purpose, was not enough, for some of 
those great, noisy bumble-bees, always hungry for 
honey, actually lengthened their tongues, so that 
they can reach all but the very deep nectaries. A 
few trusty flowers, however, have promised to keep 
closed through the day, and to open only after sun- 
set, when we love to go out on our travels. Such 
blossoms generally have the sense to wear white 
or buff or yellow petals, and are very sweet-smell- 
ing, so that we easily find them, even on dark 
nights. But I must be off." 

And away he darted on swift wings. He hov- 
ered a bit over a petunia-bed full of crimson and 
white flowers, now and then with a quick move- 
ment uncoiling his long trunk and thrusting it 
down into a blossom for nectar, and then away he 
went down a quiet green lane. He knew what 
was there waiting for him, for he had been there 
before ; and besides, the dewy air was heavy with 
the strong, sweet perfume wafted from some even- 
ing primroses that straggled along one side of the 
lane. 

Pretty soon he saw something shining out ahead 
of him, and he made straight toward the pale yel- 



A MOTH'S VISIT. 



117 



low flowers which were beckoning to him. The 
first flower he reached whispered softly, " You may 
have your supper ; but 
it 's little pollen you can 
carry for me, for some 
late-flying bees called M* 
here to fill their baskets 
with pollen to carry home 
to their greedy babies. Of 
course a little pollen-dust 
may have stuck to their 
coats, and so possibly get 
to the other primrose pis- 
tils, but every single bee 
tried to pick off every 
yellow speck and tuck it 
in his pocket." Some blossoms had been very 
cautious, and did not spread out their delicate 
corollas until they actually heard the whirring hum 
made by the wings of their night visitor. 

Before dipping down into a nectary, which in 
these flowers is at the end of a long, slender tube, 
the great moth hovered over the blossom just as a 
humming-bird does, and with his rapidly moving 




An Evening Primrose. 



H8 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

wings made a whirring, humming noise very like 
that made by these graceful little birds. 

For this reason the great-eyed sphinx-moths 
are often called " humming-bird " moths. They 
are also called " hawk-moths/' because they hover 
over blossoms in much the same way in which 
hawks do over their prey before darting down to 
seize it. There are a good many different species 
of sphinx-moths. Sometimes one flies in at an 
open window on a summer evening, and is after- 
wards found dead at the foot of a lamp. 

The particular one that visits our evening prim- 
rose and helps to fertilize its seeds is a very large 
moth. A different and somewhat smaller one with 
gray wings in front, that are prettily marked with 
dark dots and curved lines, and with the back 
wings of a rusty yellow, does the same work for 
the evening primroses in Germany that its cousin 
does for these flowers in America. 

If you have the sweet-scented honeysuckle 
growing in your yard, go out some warm even- 
ing and stand near it after twilight ; and if you 
like its perfume well enough to keep perfectly 
quiet and wait, you will be pretty sure before very 



A MOTH'S VISIT. 



119 




long to hear the loud " hum, hum, hum " of a 
sphinx-moth as — called by the sweet breath and 
light color of the blossoms — he hovers over the 
nectar-tubes and takes his delicate supper. The 
one that frequents 
honeysuckle vines 
is different from 
either of the 
sphinxes that 
visit the evening 
primrose. Other 
moths besides 
these hawk-moths 
visit flowers, and if you choose you may find out 
the very ones that are in the habit of going to 
certain plants. White, or very light-colored blos- 
soms, that are sweet-scented, are the best ones to 
watch. I have seen small whitish moths, that look 
much like butterflies, abroad in the early twilight, 
and they were doubtless on their way to flowers. 
There is much still to be learned about the fertili- 
zation of flowers by insects, and you may, by 
patient searching, find out some of the things we 
do not yet know. 



The German Sphinx Moth 
that visits the Evening Primrose. 



XXI. 
A NIGHT-BLOOMING FLOWER. 

In one of the greenhouses in the Botanic Gar- 
den near where I live is a large cactus. I want 
to tell you something about this plant. The gar- 
dener asked me one day to come and see it ; and 
I followed him to one end of the room, where 
waving palms, tall bamboo-canes, and many other 
tropical plants grew; and there I saw trailing up 
the wall a great brown stem that grew from long 
clustered roots which were partly beneath the 
earth in the floor of the hothouse and partly in 
the air. At the upper end of the main stem, 
close to the glass roof, grew multitudes of the 
thick, fleshy, three-cornered branches, around 
which here and there, in little notches along the 
edges, were tufts of bristles, that told me I had 
found the cactus. 



A NIGHT-BLOOMING FLOWER. l2 \ 

This particular kind is one of those called 
"night-blooming Cereus," because its flowers open 
only during the night. Each of its flowers is al- 
most as large as your head, and the rows of 
snow-white petals look like wax. There are sev- 
eral ranks of long, graceful sepals that turn out- 
ward from the petals, falling down in beautiful 
curves. The color of the sepals is so lovely that 
to know it you would have to see it. They are 
of a very rare light-green, sometimes almost 
white, and again of a pale buff, on the upper 
surface. The cup bears hundreds of slender, 
quivering stamens. The delicate straw-colored 
anthers 1 are borne on creamy, thread-like stalks. 
The stamens slightly curve towards the tall pistil, 
which rises in the centre of the flower. The 
cream-white style, in the blossom I examined, 
was nine and a half inches long, and of about 
the size of a pipe-stem. The stigma (which, 
you must all remember, is the outer end of the 
style) is coarsely fringed, so as to make a sort 
of spreading tassel. The stamens spring from 

1 The anthers are the little pouches that hold the pollen, borne 
on the ends of the stamens. 



122 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

the inside of the calyx-tube or cup of the flower ; 
but they grow in ranks or rows, at different 
heights along this cup, so that the upper ones 
seem to be much shorter than the lower ones, 
and those that seem the tallest, because they are 
attached near the top, do not reach within an 
inch of the tip of the pistil. Please try to re- 
member just how these beautiful stamens are 
placed about the pistil, because you will by-and- 
by see why they stand just as they do. 

Well, the other night a wonderful thing hap- 
pened, — all in the dark stillness of the green- 
house. What will you think or say when I tell 
you that sixty of the splendid starry cups of the 
great cactus one- by one opened in a single 
night ? What a sight for the flower fairies it 
must have been ! The gardener gave me one of 
the beautiful things, and I had it put away in 
the refrigerator, where it would be kept cold until 
next day, hoping that it would not close in the 
early morning like its sister flowers on the stem 
where they grew. And it did keep fresh and 
open ; so that in the afternoon of the next day I 
sent it to the photographer's to have its picture 



A NIGHT-BLOOMING FLOWER. 



123 



taken. 1 To be sure, the picture cannot tell you 
about the size of the flower, nor about the pure 
whiteness of its petals, nor the way in which the 
slender sepals shade from buff to pale green ; but 
you can see the upper end of the great pistil and 
the crowded stamens, and learn something of the 
shape of the flower. 

1 See frontispiece. 



XXII. 

A NIGHT-BLOOMING FLOWER 

(Continued). 

Now, why do you suppose these giant blos- 
soms choose to unfold their beauty in the night? 
In Nature there is a reason for everything that 
happens, if we are only able to find it out. To 
get at the reason for the night-blooming of the 
cereus, we must remember that its home is in 
tropical Mexico, where insects are more numerous 
than with us. Many of them fly after nightfall ; 
and among these is a kind of moth that is very 
fond of the nectar of the great white blossom of 
which I have been telling you. 

When I cut down through one of these flowers, 
I found several drops of thick sweet nectar in 
the large nectary at the base of the pistil. You 
see, the nectary of this flower is so deep that it 
would be hard for a bee to get at it ; but my 
lady moth just unrolls her long proboscis, and 



A NIGHT-BLOOMING FLOWER. 



I2 5 



easily sips her dainty supper from her royal dish. 
Every moth that visits a Cereus to get its nectar 
must needs brush against the multitudes of sta- 
mens that, as we may say, line the cup. Now, 
if the pollen on the anthers is ripe and ready to 
fall, you see that the head, proboscis, and front 
wings of the moth will be sprinkled with the 
shower of pollen-dust; and as the pistil rises a 
good deal above even the uppermost stamens, as 
the moth dips down into the next blossom most 
likely some of the pollen will fall on its tasselled 
stigma. And so on, from one flower to another, 
the pollen will be carried by this night-flying 
moth. Thus the seeds will be fertilized ; that is, 
made so that they will grow. 

When I cut through my great blossom I found 
in the seed-vessel that is below the nectary a 
great many small white seeds ; but in our climate 
these seeds never become perfect, because the par- 
ticular moth that in Mexico, in its nectar-seeking, 
carries the pollen of one flower to make perfect the 
seeds of the next, is not here to do this useful work. 
In its own warm country, too, the thick, fleshy 
seed-vessel ripens into a juicy fruit that is eaten 



126 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

by the people who live there ; but with us this 
gradually withers away after the blossoming is 
over. The Cereus has considerable fragrance, and 
this and the shining whiteness of its petals help 
the insects that feed upon their nectar to find 
these flowers in the darkness. Now do you see 
why this plant opens its wonderful flowers after 
dark ? If a new plant is wanted by our green- 
house gardeners in the Northern States they must 
make cuttings and plant them with care ; but where 
the cacti grow wild, on the highlands of Mexico, 
their seeds must be matured and self-sown in order 
that the stock may not die out. And this, you see, 
is wonderfully brought about by the useful habit 
the Cereus has formed of opening its flowers after 
nightfall, when its pollen will be carried about by 
certain moths which fly and feed at that time. 



XXIII. 



COMPOUND FLOWERS. 




I know of few prettier sights than a field of ox- 
eye daisies waving in the soft June winds. Chil- 
dren love to gather and play with the daisies 
wherever they grow. They will not grow in all 
parts of our own country, but are so common in 
most parts of New England that the farmers would 
be glad to be rid of them. Although they are so 
lovely they do not help to feed the cows and sheep 
and horses, and the farmers would far rather have 
the meadows and pastures covered with good grass. 
These beautiful white and gold blossoms were in 
early times brought to our country from England, 
where they thickly dot the fields and waysides. 
The English children pick them and weave them 



I2 8 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



into chains and tie them into great bunches, just 
as you do here when you want to trim your school- 
room for some festival. 

Did you ever, with your pen and ink, draw eyes, 
nose, and mouth, to imitate a face, on the bright 
yellow centre of a daisy, and then with a pair of 
scissors cut its white border into notches, so that 
it looks like the ruffle of a cap ? Two of the long 
white strips that make the outside of the daisy 
must be left uncut ; they make the strings of the 
cap. One who is clever at drawing can make 
many kinds of faces, each framed in the white 
cap-border. 

If you pick a daisy to pieces, you will see that 
the centre is made up of many separate parts ; and 
if you look at one of these parts under a magnify- 
ing-glass you will see that it is a tiny single flower, 








COMPOUND FLOU r ERS. 



129 




shaped much like a honeysuckle blossom. Here is 
a picture of one of these simple little flowers as it 
looks when seen under a glass. 

A great bundle of these slender, tube- 
shaped flowers make the yellow centre of 
the daisy. The white border is made by 
a row of single flowers of a different 
shape. Each of these white flowerets A central 
has a strap-shaped part growing out from Flower - 
one side; this is the shape of one of them. 

Flowers like the daisy, which are 
made up of a great many small single 
ones, are called compound flowers. I 
dare say you know many of this kind, 
such as the dog-fennel, that grows 
along every roadside ; the clean-smell- 
ing tansy, found in old gardens ; the 
bright marigolds ; and the great yel- 
low and brown sunflowers. 

This grouping of tiny flowers into a 

mass is very useful in helping them to 

be fertilized by insects. Small flowers 

might easily be overlooked by flying insects. But 

you can easily see that a group of such little 

9 




13° 



GLIMPSES AT THE PL A, XT-WORLD. 



flowers might make as much show, and be as 
attractive to insects as a single large blossom. In 
such flowers as the daisy, the 
many kinds of asters, the cone- 
flowers, in some places called 
" Black-eyed Susans," with 
their bright yellow margins 





A Simple Leaf. 



A Compound Leaf. 



and brown-purple centres, the tame and the wild 
sunflowers and Coreopsis, there is a striking con- 



COMPOUND FLOWERS. 



131 



trast of colors. The border-flowers, or.as botanists 
call them, ray -flozvers, are broad and ribbon- 




"\ 



•4 

\ 



A Compound Leaf. 

shaped, while the whole inside of the head is 
packed full of little tubular flowers. The rays 



I 32 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

have little else to do but to hang out their bright 
flags to call insects, and then the little central 
tube-flowers feed these visitors when they come 
with their stores of honey and pollen. 

While speaking of compound flowers, perhaps it 
is as well to say a word about compound leaves. 
If you look at a locust-tree or at a rosebush you 
will see that it has rows of single leaves along 
slender stalks which spring from the twigs ; and in 
the horse-chestnut, the hickory, and the Oxalis you 
will see groups of leaves borne on the ends of 
stalks, from which they spread out in a sort of fan- 
shape, like the fingers of a hand. The stalk with 
all its leaflets, as the little leaves are called, is 
called a compound leaf by the botanists. 



XXIV. 



PLUMED OR FEATHERED SEEDS. 



" Let me see if my mother 
wants me," said Jack, when the 
boys coaxed him to stay to play 
ball a little longer. He broke 
off the long stem of a dande- 
lion that had gone to seed, and 
blew three times at the feathery 
globe. As a few of the daintily 
plumed seeds 1 were still left 
clinging to the head after the third puff, he sprang 
back for one more game of catch. You all know 




Dandelion Seeds. 



1 What you call a dandelion-seed is really a tiny, thin-coated 
pod that holds one seed. As you have not yet learned about 
the different kinds of seeds and seed-pods, in telling you how 
seeds travel from one place to another I shall use the word 
'•seed" in a general way, just as you do. Sometimes I shall 
mean a naked seed — as in the case of the seed of the milk- 
weed, — and sometimes a seed inside its pod — as in the case of 
the dandelion or the grass-seed. 



134 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



this pretty custom of playing that the flower-seeds 
can answer questions, and I dare say have con- 
sulted them many a time, and felt quite sure you 
would get the answer which you wished, that would 
let you tarry at your play ; but I fear dandelions 
do not always know, and that the mothers some- 
times have to wait for their boys and girls. In 
some places children ask the time of day, and 
pretend that the number of seeds left tells the 
hour. All this is play, of course ; but it is more 
than mere play to the seeds that sail off so lightly 
through the air when children blow them loose 
from the tiny white, fairy-like cushion where 
they have rested. Each brown seed so set afloat 
is thus sent out on what you may call its life- 
journey ; for the end of its voyage through the 
air, on the spot where each seed at last falls and 
settles down on the earth, finishes its travels as 
a seed. But if it has fallen on " good ground," 
and sun and rain favor it, a young dandelion will 
in due time spring up, from which, in the second 
year, will bloom many golden flowers, and they 
in turn will give place to the feathery seed-globes. 
These seeds do not wait, however, for children to 



PLUMED OR FEATHERED SEEDS. 



135' 



send them off to find homes where they may 
take root and grow ; but when quite ripe the 
wind loosens them and bears them off, some far 
away, while others are dropped near the plant 







Some Plumed Seeds. 

which bore them. So you see that the plumes 
which shoot out from the tops of the dandelion- 
seeds are of great use in scattering them. With- 



I 36 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

out some such sail, by which the wind may 
carry off the seeds, they might fall on one little 
spot of earth where there would be room for only 
a very few of them to grow. 

A great many kinds of seeds besides those of 
the dandelion are provided with some means of 
travelling. Many fly or sail through the air, 
others swim on the water, and a great many are 
able to fasten themselves in one way or another 
to animals, and so secure rides to distant places, 
where they may find new homes. Thistle-seeds; 
those of the Clematis or virgin's-bower, which is 
often trained over porches ; those of most grasses ; 
the seeds of all the pines, and of many more trees 
and smaller plants, — all are adapted to be blown 
about by means of plumes, feathers, silky down, 
or delicate wings. I have seen the air alive with 
thistle-down on an autumn day, when a good 
breeze had shaken loose the lovely silken things 
that take the place of the purple thistle-flowers. 

If you examine a thistle-blossom you will see 
at once that it is a compound flower made up 
of a great many slender blossoms ; so, of course, 
these will be followed by a large number of seeds. 



PLUMED OR FEATHERED SEEDS. 



137 



One day in June the 
air about me was sud- 
denly filled with soft, 
downy flakes that, had 
it not been for the hot 
sunshine, I must have 
thought to be a snow- 
storm. Upon exami- 
nation, however, each 
bit of the floating stuff 
was found to be fast- 
ened to a tiny 
brown seed. It 
was a shower 
of willow-seeds 
blown by a 
brisk west wind 
from the ri- 
pened catkins 

of a grove of willow-trees 
half a mile or more from 
where I met the lightly drift- 
ing little travellers. Another 
seed which is well fitted to be 




Milkweed. 



138 GLIMPSES A T THE PLANT-U ORLD. 



carried by the wind is that of the large milk- 
weed. If you do not know these seeds, open one 
of the great seed-pouches, when 
quite ripe, and see the shining, ^ \t\_ 




white, flossy tuft 
of silk that 
crowns' each one of 
the flat brown seeds. 
This plant is sometimes 
called silk-weed. 



XXV. 



WINGED SEEDS. 







/c * 



Some Dragonflies. 

I told you that some seeds or seed-pods had 
wings by which they could be carried by the wind. 
I am sure you have seen some winged seeds and 
have played with them, and of some, perhaps, have 
eaten the little seed-kernel ; but maybe you have 
not thought much about their thin wings, and of 
their use in scattering the seeds. I think you all 
must know the fruit of the maple-tree. Two gauze- 
winged seed-pods are fastened to one slender stem. 
Children often pop open the seed-cases when they 
are ripe and dry, and eat the seed within. The 



I4 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

thin, beautifully-veined wings look much like the 
wings of some insects, such as dragonflies. But 
the seeds cannot move their wings at will in flying, 
as insects can, or balance themselves in the air on 
quietly outstretched wings, as do the glittering 




Winged Seeds of Mafle. 



blue or brown dragonflies, and the lovely pale- 
green creatures commonly known as lace-wings. 

The insects make their wings carry them where 
they wish to go, but the winged seeds must fly or 
sail wherever the wind may chance to bear them. 

I have spoken to you about my young friend 



WINGED SEEDS. 



141 



Jack. In a box that stands among his winter 
flower-pots he has a strong, healthy little maple- 
tree about a foot and a half high. I saw this 
treeling, and wondered how he came by such a 
thing among his geraniums, begonias, heliotrope, 
and* so on. He told me how one very windy day 
last September, as he was passing along a fine old 
street in Cambridge, a gust of wind blew a swarm 
of leaves and seeds all about him. He snatched at 
the hurrying things, and found, on opening his 
hand, that he had caught a pair of twin maple- 
seeds. He tucked them into his pocket, 
and after coming home broke them 
from their stem and planted them in 
his flower-bed. The seeds did not wait 
for spring to come before sprouting, 
but Jack says that in a very short time 
two tiny maples put their heads above 
ground. Jack carefully dug up one 
and planted it in the box of earth, 
where it has been growing just as fas'- 

An Ash-key. 

as it could all winter. Its twin, that 
was left out of doors, seems in this early spring- 
time to be alive. 



142 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



Ash-keys, as in some places children call the 
pretty, wedge-shaped fruits of the ash-tree, are also 
well-fitted to be blown about by the wind. You 




Seed of Catalpa. 



have all seen showers of elm-seeds borne along by 

a good breeze. Each small 
seed is fastened, near the 
middle, to the delicate shield 
that covers it and extends 
around it in a circular wing, 
so that these seeds are very 
light and easily carried. 





A Pine-twig with one cone 
(much reduced in size). 



A Pine seed (b), 
with its wing (a). 



WINGED SEEDS. 



143 



The catalpa-tree's showy white flowers, all mot- 
tled with gold and purple, are followed by long 
pods, in which are packed many seeds, winged 
much like those of the elm, only the curtain-like 
wing of the catalpa-seeds is slit, so as to make a 
coarse fringe around the seed. 

The best way to study the seeds of the pine-tree 
is to get one of the brown cones in the fall and put 
it for a few days in a warm, dry place ; then the 
thick, stiff scales will open, and let the little seeds, 
with their wide, thin, papery borders, drop out. 
You will see that they can fly well, because they 
are so very light, though their wings are not as 
large as those of the ash or the maple-seed. 

There are a great many other kinds of seeds 
with plumes, or wings, besides those of the dande- 
lion, the thistle, the milkweed, and the trees of 
which I have just told you ; but none are more 
interesting than these. Perhaps you can find out 
for yourselves what some of the others are. 



XXVI. 



STICK-TIGHTS. 



Many seeds that are neither plumed 
nor winged so as to be easily caught up 
and scattered here and there by the 
wind fasten themselves either to the fur 
or hair of animals or the 
clothing of people, and so 
are able to travel away from 
the place where they grew. 
You have often had to pick 
out burs from your stock- 
ings or other clothes after 

Some Stick-tights. a tramp in the woods or 

pastures. Maybe you only thought of the bother 
of picking out the seeds that cling so closely to 
the fibres of woollen cloth, and did not think 
how you had, free of charge, been giving a ride 
to many silent little people. These tiny brown 




STICK-TIGHTS. 



MS 



or green wood-folk are dumb, and cannot ask to be 

carried ; but whenever any creature touches them 

to which they can cling, they take tight hold with 

their many funny little hooked fingers, and ride 

away at their ease. Bur-bearing plants that one 

sees growing along a highway often have come 

from seeds scattered by some woodland rambler 

who sat down by the roadside to rest and remove 

the little " stick-tights " from his clothes. In some 

places this is the everyday name given to one kind 

of seeds that fasten themselves to wool or clothing. 

Many of these clinging seeds hold on by means of 

prickles that have tiny hooks on their points ; 

others are armed with two 

or more sharp, straight 

slender needles growing 

out from one end, and 

these fine needles run 

through wool or any soft 

material that chances to 

brush against them, and 

are not easily dislodged. 

A common name for some of the latter kind 

of seeds is " Spanish needles." You all know 

10 




A Burdock Bur. 



I4 6 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

burdocks, — the great weeds that grow in clumps 
in barnyards, garden corners, waste ground, and 
often by the roadside. When this 
plant is in bloom, if you examine 
one of the dull pink flowers you 
will see that this compound flower 
is held together in a green vase- 
shaped bur. Children often gather 
these large burs and stick them 
together into little baskets which 
look very pretty. Well, as the burs 
ripen, the tough hardened hooks 
that make them catch hold of any- 
thing to which they can stick ; and 
so the seeds of this coarse, bother- 
some weed are scattered far and 
wide. There are a great many 
seeds inside each bur ; and that is 
A burdock hook w h y we usually find burdocks grow- 

magnified 25 times. J J 

ing in crowded clumps, though, of 
course, not all the plants that might grow from a 
single bur can flourish on the same spot of ground 
where the seeds sprouted. One of the most 
troublesome of all burs is the sand-bur, which 



STICK-TIGHTS. 



H7 



grows abundantly on the sandy shores of the 
Great Lakes, and along the rivers in the Central 
States, and which tortures 
the foot of every barefooted 
boy who steps on it. 

Have you ever seen the 
large hooked pod of the 
Martynia ? One kind of Mar- 
tynia is grown in vegetable 
gardens, and many children 
know the pods well, after 
they have been made into pickles. 




A Sand-bur. 



They are 




A Martynia-pod. 

often called " mice," because they are so furry, 
and have such long slender tails. When these great 



I 4 8 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

pods are quite dry and ripe their hooks become al- 
most like horn. They seem to have acquired these 
hooks to enable them to fasten themselves to ani- 
mals which can carry them about. In South Amer- 
ica they are often caught by the tails of half -wild 
cattle, and thus are carried hundreds of miles over 
the dry plains. Seeds that become entangled in 
the hair or fleece of animals frequently travel a 
long way from their home, sometimes even across 
an ocean. A few years ago, in a New England 
town where there were large wool-cleaning works, 
a gentleman one day saw several strange plants 
which he knew did not belong to our country. It 
was found that these foreign plants had sprung 
from seeds that had stolen their passage either 
from Australia or South America, along with some 
imported wool. 



XXVII. 

OTHER WAYS BY WHICH SEEDS 
TRAVEL. 

In order to steal a ride, seeds need not be pro- 
vided with hooks. Everybody knows that most of 
our pulpy fruits have seeds that for some reason 
are not fit to eat. Peach-stones and plum-stones 
are too hard to be cracked by the teeth. The seeds 
of raspberries and blackberries are so small and 
hard and tough that they do not get chewed as we 
are eating the fruits to which they belong, and in 
cranberries, blueberries, figs, and many other fruits 
the seeds are so very small that most of them are 
not crushed between the teeth of the one who eats 
them. In apples and oranges the seeds are so bitter 
that it is pleasanter not to bite into them. Now 
all these and hundreds of other uneatable seeds, 
growing in sweet and juicy fruits, are examples of 
beautiful provisions of Nature to insure the scatter- 



ISO 



GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 



ing of the seeds. Whatever animal it is that eats 
such fruits, from the great black bear in a blueberry 
swamp, to the beautiful wild pigeon, feeding upon 
raspberries in the burnt pine woodlands, carries 
away hundreds or thousands of undigested seeds, 
to scatter them far and wide, where they may grow 
in new places. 

There are still other ways in which seeds manage 
to get about the world. You all have seen the va- 
rious-colored garden balsam. Some people call these 
flowers lady-slippers, or touch-me-nots. The latter 
is a queer name, isn't it? Why do you think it 
was given to the balsam, with its red or pink, or 
white or spotted blossoms ? It is because of its 
seed-pod that the plant is called by this fitting 
name of touch-me-not. Did you ever play with 
the seed-pods when they were quite ripe, and see 
how by pinching one slightly with your thumb and 
finger it would pop open, scattering the round 
brown seeds in all directions ? As the pod bursts, 
its sides split into several parts, and each one of 
these instantly curls up, and it is this motion that 
shoots forth the seeds. I have often seen a little boy 
or girl very carefully pluck a balsam seed-pod by 



OTHER WA YS BY WHICH SEEDS TRA VEL. 



151 



its short stem, so as not to burst it, and then, after 
asking another child to hold out his hand, softly- 
lay the little green bag of seeds in the palm of the 
outstretched hand, telling the owner to close it. 
Of course the pressure at once bursts the pod ; 
and the queer crawling sensation made by the 




Wild Touch-me-not. 



pod as it splits and curls itself up into a little 
heap, and by the seeds trying to jump about, is 
apt to make the child start and quickly open 
his hand to see what kind of a living thing he 
has been holding. 

The wild balsam, which to my mind is far pret- 
tier than the larger-flowered kind cultivated in 



152 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

gardens, has more delicate and easily-opened seed- 
pouches. I hope you all know this plant, with its 
graceful hanging yellow blossoms mottled with red 
or brown. The unusual shape of the lovely flowers 
has given a great many names to this plant. In 
some places it is called touch-me-not, or jewel-weed ; 
in other places it is known as lady's slipper, lady's 
pocket, or lady's eardrop. Not long ago I came 
across a rare old book that was written ever so 
long ago, soon after New England began to be set- 
tled. It tells of things found in the new world of 
America. Among other wonders that are described 
in this book is our wild balsam, which was found 
growing in Massachusetts ; only the writer calls it 
" humming-bird-tree," perhaps because he thought 
the flowers looked like tiny humming-birds, or more 
likely because these pretty creatures are often seen 
flitting about the balsam to sip the nectar from the 
swinging, jewel-like blossoms. Of all its names, 
touch-me-not seems to me the most suitable one for 
the balsam. 

" Touch-me-not," " touch-me-not," the smooth, 
slender seed-pods whisper; "if you touch me, I'll 
pop open and shoot out every one of my seeds." 



OTHER WA YS B Y WHICH SEEDS TRA VEL. 



153 



The pale-green walls of the pod are sometimes so 
thin and transparent that one can see the seeds 
within, waiting till the time shall come for their 
little prison to fling open its doors and let them 
leap out into the great world. 




Seed-pod of the wild The same bursting. 

Touch-me-not. 

Our common wild pink geranium, often called 
crane's-bill, which is related to the touch-me-not, 
also scatters its seeds by having the seed-pouches 
spring open in a curious way. Such seeds do not 
generally travel very far, but for the most part lie 
where they drop, after one quick jump from their 
tiny home; but as they go in various directions, 
the new plants that spring from them will not be 
crowded. 



I 5 4 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

One very important way in which seeds travel 
from place to place is by swimming or floating 
on water, In this way seeds sometimes journey 
hundreds or even thousands of miles from where 





Ripe pistil of the 
Wild Geranium. 



The same bursting. 



they grew, and after being washed on shore often 
sprout, take root, and grow. Many of the tall 
cocoa-palm trees which, as you have read, grow 
on islands far out at sea, have sprung from brown 
cocoanuts whose shaggy coats helped them to 
float far, far away from the trees that bore them 
on distant shores. 

The great naturalist, Mr. Darwin, found out 



O 7 HER WA YS B Y WHICH SEEDS TRA VEL. i 5 5' 

that many kinds of seeds, both large. and small, 
are able to grow after soaking even in salt sea- 




A Cocoa-palm and a Bread-fruit tree. 

water for several weeks. Seeds fall into ponds, 
brooks, or rivers from overhanging plants, or are 
carried there and dropped by the wind, and the 



I5 6 GLIMPSES AT THE PLANT-WORLD. 

flowing streams carry them on, — some falling to 
the bottom after becoming water-soaked ; others 
lodge on the banks ; and still others float on 
and on until they reach the sea, and then there 
is no telling what may be their fate. They may 
drown, or float to lands where such plants as bore 
them have never yet grown. 

" Is it the palm, the cocoa-palm, 
On the Indian Sea, by the isles of balm ? 
Or is it a ship in the breezeless calm ? 

Branches of palm are its spars and rails, 
Fibres of palm are its woven sails, 
And the rope is of palm that idly trails ! 

What does the good ship bear so well ? 
The cocoanut with its stony shell, 
And the milky sap of its inner cell." 



